Allen P A, Madden D J, Weber T A, Groth K E
Department of Psychology, Cleveland State University, Ohio 44115.
Psychol Aging. 1993 Jun;8(2):274-82. doi: 10.1037//0882-7974.8.2.274.
The authors used a lexical-decision task in 3 different experiments to examine whether age differences in word recognition were consistent across processing stage. In all experiments, word frequency and length were manipulated. In Experiments 1 and 2, encoding difficulty was varied, and in Experiment 3, response selection difficulty was varied. In all 3 experiments, there were no age differences for word frequency. However, in Experiments 1 and 2, older adults showed a larger decrement for encoding. In Experiment 3, age differences were larger when response selection load increased. These results suggest that age differences in word recognition occur because older adults exhibit primarily peripheral-rather than central-processing decrements. The implications of these data for generalized and localized slowing models are discussed.
作者在3个不同的实验中使用了词汇判断任务，以检验单词识别中的年龄差异在各个加工阶段是否一致。在所有实验中，都对单词频率和长度进行了操控。在实验1和实验2中，改变了编码难度，在实验3中，改变了反应选择难度。在所有这3个实验中，单词频率方面不存在年龄差异。然而，在实验1和实验2中，老年人在编码方面表现出更大的下降。在实验3中，当反应选择负荷增加时，年龄差异更大。这些结果表明，单词识别中的年龄差异之所以出现，是因为老年人主要表现出外周而非中枢加工能力的下降。讨论了这些数据对广义和局部减缓模型的意义。
