READING IN LATE LIFE--THE ROLE OF CONTROL AND KNOWLEDGE

人们越来越有兴趣确定老年人如何通过使用补偿因素来缓解与年龄相关的处理资源的下降。两个独立调查的因素是控制信念和知识。研究表明，对个人控制力和自我效能感感觉更强的老年人表现出更高的认知水平。同样，知识已被证明在认知功能的许多领域对老年人有利。然而，很少有研究探讨这两个因素的交集。这项拟议的研究将展示知识和控制信念如何共同作用，影响老年人在文本处理过程中的最佳表现，文本处理是日常功能的核心认知领域。年轻人和老年人的背景知识和控制信念水平不同，他们将阅读和回忆具有挑战性的领域相关和无关的段落，使用“移动窗口技术”来衡量逐字阅读时间，以此作为资源分配的指标。根据先验知识假设，知识的应用需要大量的加工资源投入。因此，老年人在文本处理过程中应用他们的知识时可能会受到特别的挑战。在控制信念激发更多努力的程度上，预计内部控制水平较高的老年人将分配必要的资源，将其知识应用于具有挑战性的领域相关文本。反过来，这种资源投入将在随后的召回业绩中得到明显体现。因此，这项研究将检验这样一种假设，即老年人在拥有更强的内部控制信念时，将主要受益于难读课文中嵌入的知识。

There is growing interest in determining how older adults can mitigate age-related declines in processing resources through the use of compensatory factors. Two such factors that have been investigated independently are control beliefs and knowledge. Research has demonstrated that older adults who have greater perceptions of personal control and self efficacy show higher levels of cognitive performance. Similarly, knowledge has been shown to benefit older adults in many domains of cognitive functioning. Little research, however, has addressed the intersection of these two factors. The proposed research will demonstrate how knowledge and control beliefs work together to influence optimal performance of older adults during text processing, a cognitive domain central to daily functioning. Young and older adults varying in levels of background knowledge and control beliefs will read and recall challenging domain- related and unrelated passages using the "moving-window technique" to measure word-by-word reading times as an index of resource allocation. According to the "prior knowledge" hypothesis, the application of knowledge requires a large investment of processing resources. Therefore, older adults may be particularly challenged when applying their knowledge during text processing. To the extent that control beliefs motivate increased effort, it is expected that older adults who have high levels of internal control will allocate the resources necessary to apply their knowledge to challenging, domain-related texts. This investment of resources, in turn, will be evident in subsequent recall performance. Thus, this research will test the hypothesis that older adults will benefit from knowledge embedded in difficult texts primarily when they have stronger internal control beliefs.