Department of Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 603 E. Daniel St., Champaign, IL, 61820, USA.
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL, USA.
Mem Cognit. 2019 May;47(4):764-778. doi: 10.3758/s13421-018-0886-5.
The present investigation provides a novel extension of the retrieving effectively from memory (REM) model to examine free-recall and recognition memory in older adults to inform our understanding of age-related cognitive decline. When some items on a list are strengthened through distributed repetitions, memory for the nonstrengthened items on that list may become impaired depending on how memory is tested-a phenomenon known as the list-strength effect (LSE; e.g., Tulving & Hastie, Journal of Experimental Psychology, 92, 297-304, 1972). When the strengthening operation involves distributed repetitions, LSE is robust in free recall, but it is reliably absent in recognition (Malmberg & Shiffrin, Journal of Experimental Psychology, 31, 322-336, 2005; Ratcliff, Clark, & Shiffrin, Journal of Experimental Psychology, 16, 163-178, 1990). Two experiments investigated LSE in recall and recognition in older adults and young adults who encoded items with full or divided attention. Despite showing impaired recall and recognition, older adults showed patterns of LSEs across both experiments that were similar to young adults with full attention rather than young adults with divided attention. In recognition, there was a null LSE in older and young adults, but a positive LSE was observed under divided attention. In contrast, in free recall, there was a positive LSE in older and young adults, but a null LSE under divided attention. Collectively, the results suggest that older adults do not have impaired encoding of context information (evidenced by intact LSE in recall), and they do not have impaired differentiation of item representations (evidenced by the null LSE in recognition). Age-related impairment in both memory tasks can be accounted for by sparse encoding of item-based information.
本研究通过扩展 REM（从记忆中有效提取）模型，检验了老年人的自由回忆和再认记忆，旨在深入了解与年龄相关的认知衰退。当列表中的某些项目通过分布式重复得到强化时，取决于记忆测试的方式，列表中未强化项目的记忆可能会受到损害，这种现象被称为列表强度效应（LSE；例如，Tulving & Hastie, 1972）。当强化操作涉及分布式重复时，LSE 在自由回忆中非常明显，但在再认中则可靠地不存在（Malmberg & Shiffrin, 2005；Ratcliff, Clark, & Shiffrin, 1990）。两项实验考察了老年人和年轻人在自由回忆和再认中的 LSE，他们使用全或分注意编码项目。尽管老年人在回忆和再认方面表现不佳，但他们在两项实验中都表现出与全注意的年轻人相似的 LSE 模式，而不是与分注意的年轻人相似。在再认中，老年人和年轻人都没有 LSE，但在分注意下则存在正的 LSE。相比之下，在自由回忆中，老年人和年轻人都存在正的 LSE，但在分注意下则不存在 LSE。总的来说，结果表明老年人对上下文信息的编码没有受损（这一点从回忆中的完整 LSE 中可以看出），他们对项目表示的区分也没有受损（这一点从再认中的无 LSE 中可以看出）。记忆任务中的年龄相关损害可以归因于项目信息的稀疏编码。
