Reading: Effects of Aging on the Interplay of Knowledge and Processing

描述(申请人提供)：阅读活动提出了关于健康认知老化的基本理论和实践问题。它在很大程度上依赖于在文字和文本主题层面上的语言模式和意义的知识。此外，这些知识必须被快速获取，以便与感知、注意力、记忆和运动控制的过程相协调，这些过程保持着每秒四到五个单词的熟练阅读速度。因此，阅读既依赖于在健康衰老过程中成长或保持的结晶语义智力，也依赖于随着健康衰老而衰退的液态智力成分。成功的阅读对老年人来说很重要，因为它有助于完成独立生活所必需的日常任务，还因为它需要积极的精神投入，可以保持和深化认知储备，可能会减轻与年龄相关的大脑变化的负面后果。本研究的目的是确定年龄和个体认知能力的差异如何影响阅读中的单词识别，以及句子理解和对文本的记忆之间的关系。这些目标将被追求：(1)通过使用在衰老研究中基本上未被利用的个体差异测量，(2)通过评估为什么老年人与年轻人相比与单词识别相关的眼动特征不同的替代解释，以及(3)通过评估基于线索的长期工作记忆框架是否能够解释衰老如何影响句子理解过程和对文本的后续记忆。这个项目对老化和阅读采取了一种创新的方法，通过评估个体差异的方式，以及如何表征和评估在线阅读策略以及阅读理解和记忆之间的关系。本研究的结果将有助于从理论上理解衰老对阅读过程中单词识别的影响，以及语言理解和记忆之间的关系。这项研究还将促进未来在认知老化的基础和应用研究中纳入准确的阅读测量。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The activity of reading raises fundamental theoretical and practical questions about healthy cognitive aging. It relies greatly on knowledge of patterns of language and of meaning at the level of words and topics of text. Further, this knowledge must be rapidly accessed so that it can be coordinated with processes of perception, attention, memory and motor control that sustain skilled reading at rates of four-to-five words a second. As such, reading depends both on crystallized semantic intelligence which grows or is maintained through healthy aging, and on components of fluid intelligence which decline with healthy aging. Successful reading is important to older adults because it facilitates completion of everyday tasks that are essential to independent living and because it entails the kind of active mental engagement that can preserve and deepen the cognitive reserve that may mitigate the negative consequences of age-related changes in the brain. The aims of the study are to determine how aging interacts with individual differences in cognitive abilities to affect word recognition durin reading and the relation between sentence comprehension and memory for text. These aims will be pursued: (1) by using individual-differences measures that are largely unexploited in the study of aging, (2) by evaluating alternative accounts of why characteristics of eye movements related to word recognition differ in older adults as compared to younger adults, and (3) by evaluating whether a cue-based long-term-working-memory framework can explain how aging affects both the process of sentence comprehension and subsequent memory for text. This project takes an innovative approach to aging and reading in the ways that it assesses individual differences and in how it characterizes and assesses both online reading strategies and the relationship between reading comprehension and memory. The results of the proposed research will advance theoretical understanding of the effects of aging on word recognition during reading and on the relationship between language comprehension and memory. The research will also facilitate future inclusion of precise measures of reading in both basic and applied studies of cognitive aging.