Age Differences in Resource Allocation During Reading

描述（由申请人提供）：在人的一生中，阅读是完成工作、满足个人需求和参与社会的必要技能，从报税到帮助孩子在教育系统中导航，再到保持通信。此外，阅读使进入新的世界允许自我持续增长。目前的老年人不仅在读写技能上处于不成比例的劣势，而且处理能力的年龄变化也使阅读的某些方面变得更加困难。这个建议是对我们研究成人在阅读过程中资源分配差异以及这些差异对随后的理解和记忆表现的影响的项目的延续的请求。我们在早期工作的基础上，将资源分配方法与（认知和情感）自我调节的文献相结合，从而考虑处理能力随年龄增长而降低的影响，对知识的依赖增加，以及社交和情感目标对阅读的作用增加。本文发展了一个理论框架，其中阅读中的自我调节被概念化为在个体读者的目标和知识背景下产生的一系列负反馈循环。采用了一种成人发展模型，其中假设衰老会导致流体能力下降（降低语言计算的效率），结晶知识增加（从而增加对先前存在的知识的依赖），以及目标的转变，相对于认知目标而言，社会情感目标相对更重要。在这个认知发展框架内，我们提出了一系列实验来探索阅读中的自我调节受到资源需求损害的条件，以及它何时可能以补偿方式使用。我们特别探讨了阅读中的自我调节如何受到以下因素的影响：(1)难以辨认的正字法、复杂的语法和信息密度（系列1、系列2和系列3）；(2)背景知识的可用性（系列4）；(3)社会和情感目标（系列5）。

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).