Effects of age on a real-world What-Where-When memory task
Effects of age on a real-world What-Where-When memory task
复制标题
年龄对现实世界何时何地记忆任务的影响
DOI：
--
复制
发表时间：
2015
影响因子：
4.8
通讯作者：
T. Smulders
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Adèle Mazurek;R. Bhoopathy;J. Read;P. Gallagher;T. Smulders
许多认知能力随着年龄的增长而下降，这使得在认知自然变化的背景下难以检测到病理变化。大多数评估认知能力下降的测试都是人工任务，与人们在日常生活中面临的问题几乎没有相似之处。这意味着人们可能很少练习做这些任务（可能导致性能下降），并且这些任务可能不是现实世界认知问题的良好预测因素。在这项研究中，我们测试了年轻人（18-25岁）和老年人（60岁以上）在一个新的，更生态有效的情景记忆测试中的表现：真实世界的什么时候在哪里（WWW）记忆测试。我们还在一系列其他认知测试中对他们进行了比较，包括工作记忆、心理速度、执行功能和情景记忆。老年人在测试电池上显示出预期的年龄相关下降。在WWW记忆任务中，老年人比年轻人更容易忘记任何WWW组合，尽管他们在整体WWW得分上没有显着差异，因为一些老年人的表现与大多数年轻人一样好或更好。WWW记忆表现显着预测的情景记忆的其他措施，如单次试验学习和长期保留的雷伊听觉言语学习任务和组合的对象位置记忆的对象重新定位任务。自我报告的记忆抱怨也预测了在WWW任务上的表现。这些研究结果证实，我们的现实世界的WWW记忆任务是一个有效的测量情节记忆，具有较高的生态效度，这可能是有用的日常记忆能力的预测。这项任务需要更多的开发，以提高其对衰老中认知能力下降的敏感性，并可能区分心理健康的老年人和那些有认知病理早期迹象的人。
Many cognitive abilities decline with aging, making it difficult to detect pathological changes against a background of natural changes in cognition. Most of the tests to assess cognitive decline are artificial tasks that have little resemblance to the problems faced by people in everyday life. This means both that people may have little practice doing such tasks (potentially contributing to the decline in performance) and that the tasks may not be good predictors of real-world cognitive problems. In this study, we test the performance of young people (18–25 years) and older people (60+-year-olds) on a novel, more ecologically valid test of episodic memory: the real-world What-Where-When (WWW) memory test. We also compare them on a battery of other cognitive tests, including working memory, psychomotor speed, executive function, and episodic memory. Older people show the expected age-related declines on the test battery. In the WWW memory task, older people were more likely to fail to remember any WWW combination than younger people were, although they did not significantly differ in their overall WWW score due to some older people performing as well as or better than most younger people. WWW memory performance was significantly predicted by other measures of episodic memory, such as the single-trial learning and long-term retention in the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning task and Combined Object Location Memory in the Object Relocation task. Self-reported memory complaints also predicted performance on the WWW task. These findings confirm that our real-world WWW memory task is a valid measure of episodic memory, with high ecological validity, which may be useful as a predictor of everyday memory abilities. The task will require a bit more development to improve its sensitivity to cognitive declines in aging and to potentially distinguish between mentally healthy older adults and those with early signs of cognitive pathologies.