Davis E E, Campbell K L
Psychology Department, Brock University, St. Catharines, Canada.
Memory. 2023 Jan;31(1):47-60. doi: 10.1080/09658211.2022.2122998. Epub 2022 Sep 15.
Event boundaries impose structure on how events are stored in long-term memory. Research with young adults has shown that associations within events are stronger than those that cross event boundaries. Recently, this effect was observed in both young and old adults using movie stimuli (Davis, Chemnitz, et al., 2021). Here, we test whether this effect extends to written narratives. Young and old participants read a series of narratives that were interspersed with temporal shifts in the storyline meant to elicit the perception of an event boundary. Later, participants were cued with sentences and were asked to recall the sentence that immediately followed. We expected participants would have worse memory when a cue and correct answer flanked a boundary than when it did not. In Experiment 1, we found that despite older adults' lower performance overall, both age groups had lower accuracy for cues that flanked a boundary, compared to cues that elicited a response from within the same event. Experiment 2 replicated the results from Experiment 1. Our results support past work that did not find age differences in event perception and demonstrate that older and younger adults may store events similarly in long-term memory.
事件边界为事件在长期记忆中的存储方式施加了结构。对年轻人的研究表明，事件内部的关联比跨越事件边界的关联更强。最近，使用电影刺激对年轻人和老年人进行的研究都观察到了这种效应（戴维斯、切姆尼茨等人，2021年）。在此，我们测试这种效应是否也适用于书面叙事。年轻和年长的参与者阅读了一系列叙事，这些叙事在故事情节中穿插了时间转换，旨在引发事件边界的感知。之后，向参与者呈现句子线索，并要求他们回忆紧接着的句子。我们预期，当线索和正确答案位于边界两侧时，参与者的记忆会比不在边界两侧时更差。在实验1中，我们发现，尽管老年人的总体表现较低，但与在同一事件中引发反应的线索相比，两个年龄组对于位于边界两侧的线索的准确率都较低。实验2重复了实验1的结果。我们的结果支持了过去未发现事件感知存在年龄差异的研究工作，并表明老年人和年轻人在长期记忆中存储事件的方式可能相似。
