Age Differences in Resource Allocation During Reading

描述（由申请人提供）：在整个生命周期中，阅读是完成工作，满足个人需求和参与社会的必要技能，从提交纳税申报表到帮助儿童通过教育系统导航到保持通信。此外，阅读使进入新的世界，允许自我的持续成长。不仅当前的老年人群体在识字技能方面处于不成比例的劣势，而且处理能力的年龄分级变化也使阅读的某些方面变得更加困难。这个建议是对我们的项目的延续的要求，该项目研究了成年人在阅读过程中资源分配的年龄差异以及这些差异对随后的理解和记忆表现的影响。我们建立在我们早期的工作，整合我们的资源分配方法与文献（认知和情感）自我调节，以考虑的影响，在处理能力的年龄分级下降，增加对知识的依赖，并增加社会和情感目标的作用阅读。一个理论框架的发展，自我调节阅读的概念化所产生的一组负反馈回路的目标和知识的背景下运作的个人读者。我们采用了一个成人发展模型，其中假设衰老会导致流体能力的下降（降低语言计算的效率），结晶知识的增加（从而增加对先前存在的知识的依赖），以及目标的转变，相对于认知目标，社会情感目标的权重相对更大。在这个认知发展的框架内，我们提出了一系列的实验，探讨条件下，自我调节阅读是妥协的资源需求，当它可以被用于补偿的方式。我们特别探讨了阅读中的自我调节如何受到以下因素的影响：（1）难以辨认的正字法、复杂的句法和信息密度（系列I、II和III）带来的挑战;（2）背景知识的可用性（系列IV）;（3）社会和情感目标（系列V）。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Throughout the life span, reading is a requisite skill for performing work, attending to personal needs, and participating in society on a number of levels from filing tax returns to helping children navigate through an educational system to maintaining correspondence. In addition, reading enables entry into new worlds allowing continued growth of the self. Not only is the current cohort of older adults disproportionately disadvantaged in literacy skills, but also age-graded changes in processing capacity make some aspects of reading more difficult. This proposal is a request for a continuation of our project examining adult age differences in resource allocation during reading and the impact of these differences on subsequent comprehension and memory performance. We build on our earlier work by integrating our resource allocation approach with the literature on (cognitive and affective) self-regulation, so as to consider the implications of age-graded reductions in processing capacity, increased reliance on knowledge, and increased role of social and emotional goals for reading. A theoretical framework is developed in which self regulation in reading is conceptualized as arising from a set of negative feedback loops functioning in the context of goals and knowledge of the individual reader. An adult developmental model is adopted in which aging is assumed to engender decreases in fluid ability (reducing the efficiency of language computations), increases in crystallized knowledge (thereby increasing reliance on preexisting knowledge), and a shift in goals which give relatively more weight to social-emotional goals relative to cognitive ones. Within this cognitive developmental framework, we propose a series of experiments that explore the conditions under which self-regulation in reading is compromised by resource demands and when it may be used in a compensatory fashion. We specifically explore how self-regulation in reading is affected by (1) challenges created by illegible orthography, complex syntax, and informational density (Series I, II, & III), (2) the availability of background knowledge (Series IV), and (3) social and affective goals (Series V).