Centro de Investigação em Ciência Psicológica (CICPSI), Faculdade de Psicologia, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal.
Human Cognitive Neuroscience, Department of Psychology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK.
Sci Rep. 2022 Jul 1;12(1):11163. doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-13559-6.
The ability to maintain visual working memory (VWM) associations about the identity and location of objects has at times been found to decrease with age. To date, however, this age-related difficulty was mostly observed in artificial visual contexts (e.g., object arrays), and so it is unclear whether it may manifest in naturalistic contexts, and in which ways. In this eye-tracking study, 26 younger and 24 healthy older adults were asked to detect changes in a critical object situated in a photographic scene (192 in total), about its identity (the object becomes a different object but maintains the same position), location (the object only changes position) or both (the object changes in location and identity). Aging was associated with a lower change detection performance. A change in identity was harder to detect than a location change, and performance was best when both features changed, especially in younger adults. Eye movements displayed minor differences between age groups (e.g., shorter saccades in older adults) but were similarly modulated by the type of change. Latencies to the first fixation were longer and the amplitude of incoming saccades was larger when the critical object changed in location. Once fixated, the target object was inspected for longer when it only changed in identity compared to location. Visually salient objects were fixated earlier, but saliency did not affect any other eye movement measures considered, nor did it interact with the type of change. Our findings suggest that even though aging results in lower performance, it does not selectively disrupt temporary bindings of object identity, location, or their association in VWM, and highlight the importance of using naturalistic contexts to discriminate the cognitive processes that undergo detriment from those that are instead spared by aging.
维持关于物体身份和位置的视觉工作记忆 (VWM) 关联的能力有时会随着年龄的增长而下降。然而，迄今为止，这种与年龄相关的困难主要在人为的视觉环境中观察到（例如，物体数组），因此尚不清楚它是否会在自然主义环境中表现出来，以及以何种方式表现出来。在这项眼动追踪研究中，26 名年轻成年人和 24 名健康老年人被要求检测摄影场景中一个关键物体的变化（总共 192 个），关于其身份（物体变成不同的物体但保持相同的位置）、位置（物体仅改变位置）或两者（物体改变位置和身份）。年龄增长与较低的变化检测表现相关。与位置变化相比，身份变化更难检测到，当两个特征都发生变化时，表现最好，尤其是在年轻成年人中。眼动显示出年龄组之间的细微差异（例如，老年人的扫视距离更短），但受变化类型的影响相似。当关键物体的位置发生变化时，第一次注视的潜伏期较长，传入扫视的幅度较大。一旦被注视，当目标物体仅在身份上发生变化而不是位置上发生变化时，其被检查的时间更长。视觉突出的物体被更早地注视，但突出度并不影响任何其他被考虑的眼动测量，也不与变化的类型相互作用。我们的发现表明，尽管年龄增长导致表现下降，但它不会选择性地破坏 VWM 中物体身份、位置或其关联的临时绑定，并且强调了使用自然主义环境来区分因衰老而受损的认知过程和未受衰老影响的认知过程的重要性。
