Effects of perceptually-based noise and distortion on memory in older adults

在我们日益工业化和拥挤的社会里，人们几乎总是在不必要的噪音中工作和生活。 随着年龄的增长，这种噪音对信息处理的负面影响变得更加明显，部分原因是与年龄相关的听力和视力下降。 除了这些知觉困难，老年人经常报告难以记住信息。 最近的研究已经确定了听觉和视觉等感知过程与记忆和理解对话等认知过程之间的联系。 该提案中概述的研究旨在探索感知和记忆过程之间的联系，以确定与年龄相关的认知差异中有多少可以追溯到感知困难，有多少应该归因于其他原因。该方法将测量，控制和操纵编码努力，并确定其对记忆性能的影响。 为了实现这一点，各种数量的视觉和听觉噪声将被添加到刺激和个人识别功能将被创建。 存储器性能将从识别函数预测。 由于感知和认知因素的复杂相互关系，计算机模拟模型将被用来进一步描述每个因素的贡献。收集的数据将有助于把研究议程的重点放在那些对克服老龄化带来的困难的战略至关重要的因素上。 这些研究的长期目标是开发一个正式的、定量的记忆模型，使研究人员和从业者能够精确定位对有效认知处理至关重要的功能区域。 在纽芬兰和拉布拉多，确定与年龄有关的认知能力下降的原因将变得越来越重要，因为加拿大统计局预测，到2031年，65岁以上的人口比例将几乎翻一番。

In our increasingly industrial and crowded society people are almost always working and living in the presence of unwanted noise. The negative impact of this noise on processing information becomes more noticeable as individuals grow older, in part as a result of age-related hearing and vision loss. In addition to these perceptual difficulties, older adults often report difficulty in remembering information. Recent research has identified a link between perceptual processes such as hearing and vision and cognitive processes, such as memory and understanding conversations. The studies outlined in this proposal are aimed at exploring the link between perceptual and memory processes in order to determine how much of the age-related cognitive differences can be traced to perceptual difficulties and how much should be attributed to other causes. The approach will be to measure, control, and manipulate encoding effort and determine its effect on memory performance. To accomplish this, various amounts of visual and auditory noise will be added to stimuli and individual identification functions will be created. Memory performance will be predicted from the identification functions. Because of the complex interrelation of perceptual and cognitive factors, computer simulation models will be used to further describe the contributions of each factor. The data collected will help focus the research agenda on those factors that are critical to strategies to overcome the difficulties posed by growing older. The long-term goal of these studies is to develop a formal, quantitative model of memory that will allow researchers and practitioners to pinpoint the areas of functioning that are critical to efficient cognitive processing. Determining the causes of age-related cognitive declines will become more and more important in Newfoundland and Labrador as the percentage of the population over the age of 65 is projected by Statistics Canada to almost double by the year 2031.