Visual Attention Lab, Brigham & Women's Hospital, Cambridge, MA, USA.
Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research, Berlin, Germany.
Neuropsychol Dev Cogn B Aging Neuropsychol Cogn. 2020 Mar;27(2):220-253. doi: 10.1080/13825585.2019.1604941. Epub 2019 May 3.
We tested younger and older observers' attention and long-term memory functions in a "hybrid search" task, in which observers look through visual displays for instances of any of several types of targets held in memory. Apart from a general slowing, search efficiency did not change with age. In both age groups, reaction times increased linearly with the visual set size and logarithmically with the memory set size, with similar relative costs of increasing load (Experiment 1). We replicated the finding and further showed that performance remained comparable between age groups when familiarity cues were made irrelevant (Experiment 2) and target-context associations were to be retrieved (Experiment 3). Our findings are at variance with theories of cognitive aging that propose age-specific deficits in attention and memory. As hybrid search resembles many real-world searches, our results might be relevant to improve the ecological validity of assessing age-related cognitive decline.
我们在“混合搜索”任务中测试了年轻和年长观察者的注意力和长期记忆功能，在该任务中，观察者通过视觉显示寻找记忆中存储的几种类型目标的实例。除了普遍的减慢之外，搜索效率不会随年龄而变化。在两个年龄组中，反应时间都随视觉集的大小呈线性增加，随记忆集的大小呈对数增加，并且负载增加的相对成本相似（实验 1）。我们复制了这一发现，并进一步表明，当熟悉度提示变得无关紧要时（实验 2），并且需要检索目标-上下文关联时（实验 3），年龄组之间的性能仍然相当。我们的发现与认知老化理论不一致，该理论提出了注意力和记忆方面的特定年龄缺陷。由于混合搜索类似于许多现实世界的搜索，因此我们的结果可能与提高评估与年龄相关的认知能力下降的生态有效性有关。
