Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest.
Department of Psychology, York University.
Psychol Aging. 2018 Dec;33(8):1105-1114. doi: 10.1037/pag0000315. Epub 2018 Dec 3.
Two prominent aspects of memory problems in older adults are a difficulty in retrieving recent episodic events and an often transient inability to retrieve names and other well-known facts from semantic memory. The question addressed in the present studies was whether these age-related difficulties reflect a common cause-a retrieval problem related to inefficient executive functions (EF). In the first study, 50 older adults were given 4 tests of EF; a derived composite measure correlated strongly with a measure of retrieval efficacy in free recall, less strongly with paired-associate recall, and nonsignificantly with retrieval of general knowledge. A second study used somewhat different measures of EF and also different measures of retrieval from semantic memory, and this study did find significant relations between EF, episodic memory, and knowledge retrieval. Changes in the specific tests representing both EF and memory retrieval changed the relations between them, suggesting that no one task is a pure measure of the theoretical constructs of either EF or episodic and semantic memory. Taken together, the 2 studies showed that individual differences in EF in older adults are correlated with retrieval efficacy in both episodic and semantic memory but also that these relations depend on the specific measures chosen to represent both EF and memory retrieval. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).
老年人记忆问题的两个突出方面是，难以回忆起最近的情景事件，以及经常短暂地无法从语义记忆中检索到姓名和其他众所周知的事实。本研究探讨的问题是，这些与年龄相关的困难是否反映了一个共同的原因——与执行功能（EF）效率低下有关的检索问题。在第一项研究中，对 50 名老年人进行了 4 项 EF 测试；派生的综合衡量标准与自由回忆中检索效率的衡量标准密切相关，与配对联想回忆的相关性较弱，与一般知识的检索相关性不显著。第二项研究使用了稍微不同的 EF 测量方法，以及来自语义记忆的不同检索测量方法，该研究确实发现 EF、情景记忆和知识检索之间存在显著关系。代表 EF 和记忆检索的特定测试的变化改变了它们之间的关系，这表明没有一个任务是 EF 或情景和语义记忆的理论结构的纯度量。总的来说，这两项研究表明，老年人的 EF 个体差异与情景记忆和语义记忆中的检索效率相关，但这些关系也取决于选择来代表 EF 和记忆检索的具体措施。（PsycINFO 数据库记录（c）2018 APA，保留所有权利）。
