Madden D J
Exp Aging Res. 1986 Summer;12(2):71-8. doi: 10.1080/03610738608259439.
The present experiment examined adult age differences in semantic priming effects and subsequent episodic retention for visually presented words. Twenty-four young (18-22 years) and 24 older (58-74 years) adults participated. In a lexical decision task, each of the word targets was presented as the final item of a sentence context (i.e., a prime) that was either semantically congruous, incongruous, or neutral with regard to the target. The perceptual difficulty of the target was also varied. The semantic priming effects in lexical decision RT were equivalent in magnitude for the young and older adults. The RT data appeared to represent a generalized, age-related slowing in the speed of information processing. In unexpected tests of recall and recognition for the target words, the older adults performed significantly worse than the young adults. The present results indicate that age-related deficits in episodic memory are not accompanied by substantial changes in semantic encoding ability.
本实验研究了成年人在语义启动效应以及随后对视觉呈现单词的情景记忆方面的年龄差异。24名年轻人（18 - 22岁）和24名年长者（58 - 74岁）参与了实验。在词汇判断任务中，每个单词目标作为句子语境（即启动词）的最后一项呈现，该语境与目标在语义上要么一致、要么不一致、要么中性。目标的感知难度也有所变化。年轻人和年长者在词汇判断反应时中的语义启动效应大小相当。反应时数据似乎代表了与年龄相关的信息处理速度普遍减慢。在对目标单词的意外回忆和识别测试中，年长者的表现明显比年轻人差。目前的结果表明，情景记忆中与年龄相关的缺陷并未伴随着语义编码能力的实质性变化。
