ABSTRACT

Episodic memory (EM) is a subsystem responsible for storing and evoking information about the “What”, “Where” and “When” elements of an event in an integrated way. This capacity depends of structures with hippocampus and prefrontal cortex. The effect of aging on some capacities mediated by these areas, such as the influence of the number of objects on the coding of EM, remains unexplored. The present study examined the memory recall capacity of young and older adults in an EM task which used the number of 2, 4 and 6 items associated with specific space-temporal contexts. The young adults showed better performance coefficients than the older adults in all tasks, regardless of the load used, for all questions, except the “What” type. The group differences increase with load augmentation, stabilizing from the tasks with 4 items. In short, the EM efficiency, evaluated through What-Where-When Task, depends on the quantity information encoding.

摘要

情景记忆 (EM) 是一个子系统，负责以集成方式存储和唤起有关事件的“什么”、“地点”和“何时”元素的信息。这种能力取决于海马体和前额叶皮层的结构。衰老对这些区域介导的某些能力的影响，例如物体数量对 EM 编码的影响，仍未得到探索。本研究在一项 EM 任务中检查了年轻人和老年人的记忆回忆能力，该任务使用了与特定时空背景相关的 2、4 和 6 个项目的数量。年轻人在所有任务中都表现出比老年人更好的表现系数，无论使用的负荷如何，对于所有问题，除了“什么”类型。组差异随着负载增加而增加，从 4 个项目的任务中稳定下来。简而言之，