Fuentes Luis J, Molina Michael, Plaza Victoria, García-Pérez Angel, Estévez Angeles F
Departamento de Psicología Básica y Metodología, Universidad de Murcia, Murcia, Spain.
Escuela de Educación, Facultad de Humanidades, Universidad Mayor, Santiago, Chile.
Acta Psychol (Amst). 2020 Jul;208:103103. doi: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2020.103103. Epub 2020 Jun 19.
Working memory (WM) has been thought to be the cause of associative memory deficits in older adults. Previous research has demonstrated the benefits of a discriminative learning procedure, the differential outcomes procedure (DOP), to ameliorate such associative-memory maintenance deficits in situations that simulate adherence to medical prescriptions in both healthy and pathological ageing. Specifically, the DOP involves rewarding each correct response to each stimulus-stimulus association with a distinct and unique outcome (reinforcer). The aim of the present study was to explore the limits of this procedure by testing the amount of cognitive load at which the DOP improves discriminative learning and associative memory in a task that simulates adherence to medical treatment in undergraduate students. During the training phase, participants were asked to learn three pill/name (low-load condition) or four pill/name associations (high-load conditions) under the DOP in comparison with a control condition (the non-differential outcomes condition, NOP). Long-term retention of such learned associations was tested 1h and 1week after completion of the training phase. Participants showed a better accuracy and long-term retention of the learned associations when the DOP was used, but just in the high-load condition. These results suggest that when WM is overtaxed, the DOP plays a fundamental role in the long-term maintenance of the learned stimulus-stimulus associations, rendering such learning procedure as a useful technique to enhance people's discriminative learning and associative memory.
工作记忆（WM）一直被认为是老年人联想记忆缺陷的原因。先前的研究已经证明了一种辨别学习程序——差异结果程序（DOP）的益处，即在模拟健康和病理性衰老中遵守医疗处方的情况下，改善这种联想记忆维持缺陷。具体而言，DOP包括用独特且唯一的结果（强化物）奖励对每个刺激-刺激关联的每次正确反应。本研究的目的是通过测试在一项模拟大学生遵守医疗治疗的任务中，DOP改善辨别学习和联想记忆时的认知负荷量，来探索该程序的局限性。在训练阶段，与对照条件（非差异结果条件，NOP）相比，要求参与者在DOP下学习三种药丸/名称（低负荷条件）或四种药丸/名称关联（高负荷条件）。在训练阶段完成后1小时和1周测试此类所学关联的长期保持情况。当使用DOP时，参与者在所学关联方面表现出更好的准确性和长期保持能力，但仅在高负荷条件下如此。这些结果表明，当工作记忆负担过重时DOP在所学刺激-刺激关联的长期维持中起着重要作用，使这种学习程序成为增强人们辨别学习和联想记忆的有用技术。
