AGE DIFFERENCE IN ATTENTION--CONSEQUENCES FOR MEMORY

这一建议提出了一个研究认知机制的框架。 注意力和记忆力变化之间的关系 在健康的老年人中有所下降。主要的假设是衰老 影响过程的运行，参与形成 语言概念之间的兴奋性和抑制性联系， 用于创建集成表示的连接，而 同时保持概念彼此不同以及与先前的概念不同 知识。 检验了三个主要预测：(1)衰老会降低 中包含的各个单词之间形成的兴奋性连接 言语输入；(2)老年人抑制无关输入的能力较差 与年轻人相比；以及(3)年龄差异存在 当输入发生冲突时，将输入从先前的语义知识中分离出来 有这种先验知识，或很难与之区分的。 这八个实验中的每一个都涉及言语刺激的呈现 (单个词、词对或句子)，然后进行记忆测试 (自由回忆、提示回忆或再认记忆)。所有都涉及 年轻人、中年人和老年人之间的比较。此外，a 这些试验的子集将用于患有以下疾病的患者 顺行性健忘症。因为注意力被认为会影响记忆力 只有在健康老龄化组中起作用的健忘症人群才会 提供一个重要的对比组。

This proposal sets out a framework to study the cognitive mechanisms underlying the relationship between changes in attention and memory declines in healthy older adults. The primary hypothesis is that aging affects the operation of processes involved in the formation of excitatory and inhibitory connections between verbal concepts, connections which serve to create integrated representations while simultaneously keeping concepts distinct from each other and from prior knowledge. Three main predictions are tested: (1) Aging reduces the strength of excitatory connections formed between individual words contained in verbal input; (2) Older adults are less able to suppress irrelevant input than younger adults; and (3) Age differences occur in the ability to segregate input from prior semantic knowledge, when the input conflicts with, or is difficult to discriminate from that prior knowledge. Each of the eight experiments involves the presentation of verbal stimuli (individual words, word pairs, or sentences) followed by a memory test (free recall, cued recall, or recognition memory). All involve comparisons between young, middle-aged, and older adults. In addition, a subset of the experiments will be administered to patients with anterograde amnesia. Because attention is believed to affect memory functioning only in the healthy aging group, the amnesic population will provide an important comparison group.