AGE DIFFERENCE IN ATTENTION--CONSEQUENCES FOR MEMORY

这一建议提出了一个框架来研究认知机制 注意力和记忆力变化之间的关系 在健康的老年人中下降。 主要的假设是， 影响了参与形成的过程的操作， 言语概念之间的兴奋和抑制联系， 连接，用于创建集成表示， 同时保持概念彼此之间以及与先前概念之间的区别， 知识 三个主要的预测进行了测试：（1）老化降低的强度， 兴奋性连接之间形成的个别单词包含在 言语输入;（2）老年人抑制无关输入的能力较弱 （3）年龄差异发生在能力上， 当输入冲突时，将输入与先前的语义知识分离 或者很难与先前的知识区分开来。 八个实验中的每一个都涉及言语刺激的呈现 （单个单词、单词对或句子），然后进行记忆测试 (free回忆，线索回忆，或识别记忆）。 都涉及 年轻人、中年人和老年人之间的比较。 另外还有按 实验的一个子集将被给予具有以下特征的患者： 顺行性遗忘 因为人们相信注意力会影响记忆 只有在健康的老龄化群体中，健忘症人群将 提供了一个重要的对照组。

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.