School of Philosophy, Psychology & Language Sciences, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK.
Department of Psychology, University of York, York, UK.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2024 Jun;77(6):1179-1189. doi: 10.1177/17470218231195341. Epub 2023 Aug 23.
Semantic cognition refers to the storage and appropriate use of knowledge acquired over the lifespan and underpins our everyday verbal and non-verbal behaviours. Successful semantic cognition requires representation of knowledge and control processes which ensure that currently relevant aspects of knowledge are retrieved and selected. Although these abilities have been widely studied in healthy young populations and semantically impaired patients, it is unclear how they change as a function of healthy ageing, especially for non-verbal semantic processing. Here, we addressed this issue by comparing the performance profiles of young and older people on a semantic knowledge task and a semantic control task, across verbal (word) and non-verbal (picture) versions. The results revealed distinct patterns of change during adulthood for semantic knowledge and semantic control. Older people performed better in both verbal and non-verbal knowledge tasks than young people. However, although the older group showed preserved controlled retrieval for verbal semantics, they demonstrated a specific impairment for non-verbal semantic control. These findings indicate that the effects of ageing on semantic cognition are more complex than previously assumed, and that input modality plays an important role in the shifting cognitive architecture of semantics in later life.
语义认知是指对一生中获得的知识的存储和恰当运用，它是我们日常言语和非言语行为的基础。成功的语义认知需要知识的表示和控制过程，以确保当前相关的知识被检索和选择。尽管这些能力在健康的年轻人群和语义障碍患者中得到了广泛的研究，但它们如何随健康衰老而变化，特别是对于非言语语义处理，还不清楚。在这里，我们通过比较年轻人和老年人在语义知识任务和语义控制任务中的表现特征，来解决这个问题，这些任务涵盖了言语（单词）和非言语（图片）两种形式。结果表明，在成年期，语义知识和语义控制的变化模式是不同的。老年人在言语和非言语知识任务中的表现都优于年轻人。然而，尽管老年组在言语语义的受控检索中表现出了保留，但他们在非言语语义控制方面表现出了特定的障碍。这些发现表明，衰老对语义认知的影响比之前假设的更为复杂，输入模态在晚年语义认知的转移认知结构中起着重要作用。
