Department of Psychology, City, University of London, Northampton Square, London, United Kingdom.
Department of Psychology and Sport Sciences, University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, United Kingdom.
PLoS One. 2021 Oct 29;16(10):e0259279. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0259279. eCollection 2021.
Studies examining age effects in autobiographical memory have produced inconsistent results. This study examined whether a set of typical autobiographical memory measures produced equivalent results in a single participant sample. Five memory tests (everyday memory, autobiographical memory from the past year, autobiographical memory from age 11-17, word-cued autobiographical memory, and word-list recall) were administered in a single sample of young and older adults. There was significant variance in the tests' sensitivity to age: word-cued autobiographical memory produced the largest deficit in older adults, similar in magnitude to word-list recall. In contrast, older adults performed comparatively well on the other measures. The pattern of findings was broadly consistent with the results of previous investigations, suggesting that (1) the results of the different AM tasks are reliable, and (2) variable age effects in the autobiographical memory literature are at least partly due to the use of different tasks, which cannot be considered interchangeable measures of autobiographical memory ability. The results are also consistent with recent work dissociating measures of specificity and detail in autobiographical memory, and suggest that specificity is particularly sensitive to ageing. In contrast, detail is less sensitive to ageing, but is influenced by retention interval and event type. The extent to which retention interval and event type interact with age remains unclear; further research using specially designed autobiographical memory tasks could resolve this issue.
研究考察了自传体记忆中的年龄效应，得出的结果不一致。本研究检验了一组典型的自传体记忆测试在单个参与者样本中是否产生了等效的结果。在年轻和老年成年人的单个样本中，进行了五项记忆测试（日常记忆、过去一年的自传体记忆、11-17 岁的自传体记忆、单词提示的自传体记忆和单词列表回忆）。这些测试对年龄的敏感性存在显著差异：单词提示的自传体记忆对老年人的影响最大，与单词列表回忆的影响相当。相比之下，老年人在其他测量方面表现相对较好。这些发现的模式与之前调查的结果大致一致，表明（1）不同 AM 任务的结果是可靠的，（2）自传体记忆文献中的可变年龄效应至少部分归因于使用不同的任务，这些任务不能被视为自传体记忆能力的可互换测量指标。这些结果也与最近分离自传体记忆特异性和细节的工作一致，并表明特异性对老化特别敏感。相比之下，细节对老化的敏感性较低，但受保留间隔和事件类型的影响。保留间隔和事件类型与年龄的相互作用程度仍不清楚；进一步使用专门设计的自传体记忆任务的研究可以解决这个问题。
