Keha Eldad, Aisenberg-Shafran Daniela, Hochman Shachar, Kalanthroff Eyal
Department of Psychology, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mt. Scopus, 91905, Jerusalem, Israel.
Department of Psychology, Achva Academic College, Arugot, Israel.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2025 Jan 17. doi: 10.3758/s13423-024-02631-z.
Older adults were found to struggle with tasks that require cognitive control. One task that measures the ability to exert cognitive control is the color-word Stroop task. Almost all studies that tested cognitive control in older adults using the Stroop task have focused on one type of control - Information control. In the present work, we ask whether older adults also show a deficit in another type of cognitive control - Task control. To that end, we tested older and younger adults by isolating and measuring two types of conflict - information conflict and task conflict. Information conflict was measured by the difference between color identification of incongruent color words and color identification of neutral words, while task conflict was measured by the difference between color identification of neutral words and color identification of neutral symbols and by the reverse facilitation effect. We tested how the behavioral markers of these two types of conflicts are affected under low task control conditions, which is essential for measuring task conflict behaviorally. Older adults demonstrated a deficit in information control by showing a larger information conflict marker, but not in task control markers, as no differences in task conflict were found between younger and older adults. These findings supported previous studies that work against theories that link the larger Stroop interference in older adults to a generic slowdown or a generic inhibitory failure. We discussed the relevancy of the results and future research directions in line with other Stroop studies that tested age-related differences in different control mechanisms.
研究发现，老年人在需要认知控制的任务上存在困难。一种测量认知控制能力的任务是颜色 - 文字斯特鲁普任务。几乎所有使用斯特鲁普任务测试老年人认知控制的研究都集中在一种控制类型——信息控制上。在本研究中，我们探讨老年人在另一种认知控制类型——任务控制方面是否也存在缺陷。为此，我们通过分离和测量两种冲突类型——信息冲突和任务冲突，对老年人和年轻人进行了测试。信息冲突通过不一致颜色词的颜色识别与中性词的颜色识别之间的差异来衡量，而任务冲突通过中性词的颜色识别与中性符号的颜色识别之间的差异以及反向促进效应来衡量。我们测试了在低任务控制条件下这两种冲突类型的行为指标是如何受到影响的，这对于从行为上测量任务冲突至关重要。老年人通过表现出更大的信息冲突指标，显示出在信息控制方面存在缺陷，但在任务控制指标方面没有，因为在年轻人和老年人之间未发现任务冲突存在差异。这些发现支持了先前的研究，这些研究与将老年人中更大的斯特鲁普干扰与普遍的反应减慢或普遍的抑制失败联系起来的理论相悖。我们结合其他测试不同控制机制中年龄相关差异的斯特鲁普研究，讨论了结果的相关性和未来的研究方向。
