Age Differences in Resource Allocation During Reading

描述(由申请人提供)：成人生活的有效导航，包括工作场所能力和家庭健康管理，严重依赖于理解和使用文本的能力。根据文本和任务需求，阅读既取决于工作记忆/执行控制过程和知识，也取决于将注意力引导到语言理解和记忆的各种处理需求的技能。正常情况下，衰老会导致工作记忆和执行控制能力的下降，但会导致知识和语言能力的增长，因此人们可能会认为语言处理的性质会在一生中发生变化。事实上，有相当多的证据表明，对文本的记忆随着年龄的增长而下降，然而，这种效应存在着相当大的变异性，年龄差异可能取决于文本、任务和读者的特点。本研究将从一个自我调节的语言加工模型(Stine-Morrow，Miller，&Hertzog，2006)来考察成人语言加工的基本机制。该模型认为，文本直接给出的内容的表征(“语料库”)和话语所暗示的情景的表征(“情景模型”)是独立调节的。读者被认为通过运用注意资源来理解特定文本的方式(Stine-Morrow，Miller，Gagne，&Hertzog，2008)和他们选择不同信息源的方式(Piroll li&Card，1999；Fu&Piroll li，2007)来调节这一表征的构建。文本基础和情景表征的精确度部分取决于读者的认知和社会情感目标，支撑语言处理的能力星座，以及与读者的能力、兴趣和知识相适应的文本和其他资源的可用性。提出了一系列研究，以(A)使用使用共同测量的新范式来检验衰老带来语料库和情境模型加工差异的假设，(B)检验与年龄相关的工作记忆下降的概念，造成低估语料库表征的倾向，并检查可能缓解这一影响的条件，(C)检验老年人在管理多个字符的情境表征方面存在特定缺陷的想法，并检验这个问题的文本工程解决方案，这些解决方案可以很容易地在电子文本中实施，以及(D)检验在使用多种(文本)来源来优化学习方面的年龄差异。 公共卫生相关性：工作场所的能力、管理家庭健康和保持社会沟通都取决于有效的语言理解和记忆。现在有相当多的文献表明，在某些方面，语言理解和记忆可能会因为正常、健康的衰老而受损。我们必须了解与年龄相关的语言处理变化背后的基本认知机制，以便我们能够解决与这些变化相关的实际问题(例如，基于过程的健康素养模式，将阅读作为一种智力参与形式，以在一生中保持认知活力)。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Effective navigation through adult life, including workplace competence and managing family health, is critically dependent upon the ability to understand and use text. Depending on the text and task demands, reading can depend on both working memory / executive control processes and knowledge, as well as skill in directing attention to the various processing demands of language comprehension and memory. Aging normatively brings both declines in working memory and executive control, but growth in knowledge and verbal ability, so that one might expect the nature of language processing to change through the life span. In fact, there is considerable evidence showing that memory for text declines with aging, however, there is considerable variability in this effect and age differences can depend on characteristics of the text, the task, and the reader. The proposed research will examine the fundamental mechanisms of adult language processing in terms of a model of self-regulated language processing (Stine-Morrow, Miller, & Hertzog, 2006) suggesting that the representation the content given directly by the text (the "textbase") and the representation of the situation suggested by the discourse (the "situation model") are independently regulated. Readers are assumed to regulate the construction of this representation both in the way in which they engage attentional resources to understand particular texts (Stine-Morrow, Miller, Gagne, & Hertzog, 2008) and in the way in which they select different information sources (Pirolli & Card, 1999; Fu & Pirolli, 2007). The fidelity to which the textbase and situational representations are constructed depends, in part, on the cognitive and socioemotional goals of the reader, the constellation of abilities that underpin language processing, and the availability of texts and other resources compatible with readers' abilities, interests, and knowledge. A series of studies is proposed to (a) test the hypothesis that aging brings divergence in textbase and situation model processing, using novel paradigms that use common metrics, (b) test the notion that age-related decreases in working memory create a tendency to underspecify the textbase representation and examine conditions that might mitigate against this effect, (c) test the idea that older adults have specific deficits with managing situational representations of multiple characters and examine text engineering solutions to this problem that can be easily implemented in e-text, and (d) examine age differences in the use of multiple (text) sources to optimize learning. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: Workplace competence, managing family health, and maintaining social communication all hinge on effective language understanding and memory. There is now a considerable literature suggesting that in certain respects, language understanding and memory can become compromised as a function of normal, healthy aging. It is critical that we understand the basic cognitive mechanisms underlying age-related change in language processing so that we can grapple with the practical problems associated with these changes (e.g., process-based models of health literacy, reading as a form of intellectual engagement to maintain cognitive vitality through the life span).