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

人们越来越感兴趣的是，确定老年人如何通过使用补偿因素来减轻与年龄相关的加工资源下降。 两个这样的因素，已被独立调查的控制信念和知识。研究表明，对个人控制和自我效能感有更大感知的老年人表现出更高水平的认知表现。 同样，知识已被证明有利于老年人在许多领域的认知功能。 然而，很少有研究涉及这两个因素的交叉点。 拟议的研究将展示知识和控制信念如何共同影响老年人在文本处理过程中的最佳表现，这是一个对日常功能至关重要的认知领域。不同背景知识和控制信念水平的年轻人和老年人将阅读和回忆具有挑战性的领域相关和不相关的段落，使用“移动窗口技术”来测量逐字阅读时间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处理资源的投入。 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。 在某种程度上，控制信念激励更多的努力，预计老年人谁拥有高水平的内部控制将分配必要的资源，将他们的知识应用到具有挑战性的，领域相关的文本。反过来，这种资源投资将在随后的召回性能中表现得很明显。 因此，这项研究将测试的假设，老年人将受益于知识嵌入在困难的文本，主要是当他们有更强的内部控制信念。

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.