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中，人们几乎总是在讨厌的噪音中工作和生活。随着个人年龄的增长，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丧失。除了这些感知上的困难，老年人经常报告在记忆信息方面有困难。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。本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、控制和操纵编码工作，并确定其对内存性能的影响。为了实现这一目标，将在刺激中添加不同数量的视觉和听觉噪音，并创建个人识别功能。记忆性能将由识别函数预测。由于感知和认知因素之间复杂的相互关系，计算机模拟模型将用于进一步描述每个因素的贡献。所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所造成的困难的战略至关重要的因素上。这些研究的长期目标是建立一个正式的、定量的记忆模型，使研究人员和实践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，确定与年龄相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计，到2031年，65岁以上人口的比例将几乎翻一番。

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.