Department of Cognitive Neuropsychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA.
Department of Neurosciences, Laboratory for Neuro- & Psychophysiology, KU Leuven-University of Leuven, Belgium.
Neural Plast. 2021 Oct 4;2021:6612805. doi: 10.1155/2021/6612805. eCollection 2021.
Working memory (WM) is one of the most investigated cognitive functions albeit the extent to which individual characteristics impact on performance is still unclear, especially when older adults are involved. The present study considers repeated practice of a visual -Back task with three difficulty levels (1-, 2-, and 3-Back) in healthy young and older individuals. Our results reveal that, for both age groups, the expected mental fatigue was countered by a learning effect, in terms of accuracies and reaction times, which turned out to benefit females more than males, for all three -Back levels. We conclude that future WM studies, in particular when relying on repeated -Back sessions, should account for learning effects in relation to mental fatigue and gender, in both young and older adults.
工作记忆 (WM) 是研究最多的认知功能之一，尽管个体特征对表现的影响程度仍不清楚，尤其是在涉及老年人时。本研究考虑了健康的年轻和老年人在三个难度级别 (1-、2- 和 3- 回) 下重复进行视觉 -Back 任务。我们的结果表明，对于两个年龄组，在准确性和反应时间方面，预期的精神疲劳都被学习效应所抵消，对于所有三个 -Back 级别，学习效应对女性的影响大于男性。我们得出结论，未来的 WM 研究，特别是当依赖于重复的 -Back 会议时，应考虑到与精神疲劳和性别相关的学习效应，无论是在年轻人还是老年人中。
