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

描述（由申请人提供）：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语言模式的知识和意义的水平上的话和主题的文本。此外，这些知识必须快速获取，以便与感知、注意力、记忆和运动控制的过程协调，从而以每秒4到5个单词的速度维持熟练的阅读。因此，阅读既依赖于通过健康老龄化而增长或保持的结晶语义智力，也依赖于随着健康老龄化而衰退的流体智力的组成部分。成功的阅读对老年人很重要，因为它有助于完成对独立生活至关重要的日常任务，因为它需要积极的精神参与，可以保持和深化认知储备，从而减轻与年龄相关的大脑变化的负面影响。本研究的目的是确定年龄与个体认知能力差异之间的相互作用如何影响阅读过程中的单词识别以及句子理解与文本记忆之间的关系。将努力实现这些目标：（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可以解释衰老如何影响句子理解和随后的文本记忆过程。这个项目采取了一种创新的方法来老化和阅读的方式，它评估个体差异，并在它如何表征和评估两个在线阅读策略和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年龄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。这项研究也将促进未来在认知老化的基础和应用研究中纳入阅读的精确测量。

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.