Background/Study context: Maintenance in verbal working memory is thought to rely on two main systems: a phonological and a semantic system. The three objectives of the present study were to clarify how these systems are organized and interact, to examine whether their involvement in maintenance changes with aging, and to identify which underlying mechanism accounts for both age-related changes in the available set of mechanisms and immediate recall.Methods: To address these issues, we examined age-related changes in strategic aspects of maintenance of information in working memory. We collected trial-by-trial verbal reports of which strategy young and older adults used while accomplishing a verbal complex span task. In addition, individuals' speed of articulation was collected.Results: Results support the existence of separable systems (i.e., phonological and semantic systems) that participants combine to cope with increasing memory loads. We also found age-related differences (e.g., older individuals used more strategies than young individuals and used available strategies unequally often) and invariance (e.g., both age groups used strategies based on phonological and semantic processing) in strategic aspects of working memory maintenance. Importantly, articulation speed accounted for effects of both memory load and age on strategy distributions as well as for age-related differences in immediate recall.Conclusion: Our findings suggest that young and older adults' use of common and different sets of maintenance mechanisms stems for the constraints of the phonological loop in working memory, especially the speed of articulation, which slowed down with aging.

中文翻译：

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言语工作记忆策略中与年龄相关的变化。

背景/研究背景：语言工作记忆的维护被认为依赖于两个主要系统：语音系统和语义系统。本研究的三个目标是阐明这些系统是如何组织和相互作用的，检查它们是否随着年龄的增长而参与维护变化，并确定在可用的一套机制和即时机制中，哪些根本机制既考虑了与年龄有关的变化方法：为了解决这些问题，我们研究了与年龄相关的工作记忆信息维护策略方面的变化。我们收集了逐项口头报告，报告了年轻人和老年人在完成口头复杂跨度任务时使用的策略。此外，还收集了个人的发音速度。结果：结果支持可分离系统的存在（即，语音和语义系统），参与者可以结合起来以应对不断增加的记忆负荷。我们还发现，在工作记忆维持的战略方面，年龄相关差异（例如，老年人使用的策略多于年轻人，并且不平等地使用可用策略）和不变性（例如，两个年龄组均使用基于语音和语义处理的策略）。重要的是，发音速度考虑了记忆负荷和年龄对策略分布的影响以及即时召回中与年龄相关的差异。结论：我们的研究结果表明，年轻人和老年人使用共同的和不同的维持机制集的原因在于语音回路在工作记忆中的限制，尤其是发音速度，随着年龄的增长而减慢。