Age Differences in Resource Allocation During Reading

描述(由申请人提供)：在一生中，阅读是完成工作、满足个人需求以及参与社会各个层面的必备技能，从提交纳税申报单到帮助孩子在教育系统中导航，再到保持通信。此外，阅读使我们能够进入新的世界，让自我继续成长。不仅是因为目前的老年人在识字技能上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。这项提案是要求继续我们的项目，研究成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。我们在早期工作的基础上，将我们的资源分配方法与(认知和情感)自我调节的文献相结合，以考虑加工能力随着年龄的降低、对知识的依赖增加以及社会和情感目标对阅读的作用增加所产生的影响。本文提出了一个理论框架，在该框架中，阅读中的自我调节被概念化为产生于个体读者的目标和知识背景下的一系列负反馈回路。采用成人发展模型，假设年龄增长会导致流动能力的下降(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。在这一认知发展框架下，我们提出了一系列实验，以探索阅读中的自我调节在何种情况下会受到资源需求的影响，以及何时可以以补偿的方式使用。我们具体探讨阅读中的自我调节如何受到以下因素的影响：(1)难以辨认的拼写、复杂的句法和信息密度带来的挑战(系列I、II和III)；(2)背景知识的可用性(系列IV)；以及(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).