The effects of attention on age-related relational memory deficits: evidence from a novel attentional manipulation.
The effects of attention on age-related relational memory deficits: evidence from a novel attentional manipulation.
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注意力对与年龄相关的关系记忆缺陷的影响：来自一种新颖的注意力操纵的证据。
DOI：
10.1037/a0022326
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发表时间：
2011
影响因子：
3.7
通讯作者：
Giovanello,KellyS
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Kim,So-Yeon;Giovanello,KellyS
健康的衰老往往伴随着情景记忆的衰退。先前的研究一致表明，老年人在关系记忆（RM）方面表现出与项目记忆（IM）不成比例的缺陷。尽管有大量证据表明与年龄相关的RM赤字，但这种赤字的来源仍未明确。年龄相关的RM损伤最广泛研究的因素之一是注意力资源的减少。然而，没有先前的研究表明，注意力资源的减少是与年龄相关的RM缺陷的关键来源。在这里，我们使用了不同性质的注意力任务，并测试了关系处理注意力的减少是否导致了在衰老中观察到的RM缺陷。在实验1中，我们在情景记忆编码过程中对年轻人施加了项目检测或关系检测注意任务，发现只有涉及关系处理的并发注意任务对年轻人的情景记忆表现有不成比例的损害。此外，通过排除任务难度对不成比例的RM缺陷的可能混淆，我们进一步证明关系注意减少是年龄相关RM缺陷的关键因素。在实验2中，我们使用不同的刺激材料重复了实验1的结果，发现关系注意对RM的影响具有材料普遍性。实验2的结果还表明，年轻人在关系处理方面的注意力资源减少，其RM表现与老年人惊人地相当。因此，本研究首次证明了关系处理的注意力资源减少是衰老过程中关系记忆障碍的关键因素。（PsycINFO数据库记录(c) 2016 APA，版权所有）
Healthy aging is often accompanied by episodic memory decline. Prior studies have consistently demonstrated that older adults show disproportionate deficits in relational memory (RM) relative to item memory (IM). Despite rich evidence of an age-related RM deficit, the source of this deficit remains unspecified. One of the most widely investigated factors of age-related RM impairment is a reduction in attentional resources. However, no prior studies have demonstrated that reduced attentional resources are the critical source of age-related RM deficits. Here, we used qualitatively different attention tasks and tested whether reduced attention for relational processing underlies the RM deficit observed in aging. In Experiment 1, we imposed either item-detection or relation-detection attention tasks on young adults during episodic memory encoding and found that only the concurrent attention task that involves relational processing disproportionately impaired RM performance in young adults. Moreover, by ruling out the possible confound of task difficulty on the disproportionate RM impairment, we further demonstrated that reduced relational attention is a key factor for the age-related RM deficit. In Experiment 2, we replicated the results from Experiment 1 by using different materials of stimuli and found that the effect of relational attention on RM is material general. The results of Experiment 2 also showed that reducing attentional resources for relational processing in young adults strikingly equated their RM performance to that of older adults. Thus, this study documents the first evidence that reduced attentional resources for relational processing are a critical factor for the relational memory impairment observed in aging.(PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)