The present study investigated age-related differences in the ability to constrain attention to the current task, without contamination (bleeding) from an upcoming decision. Each experiment included two blocks of trials. During Block 1, participants initially incidentally encoded a list of high- and low-frequency words, after which they pronounced aloud the studied words intermixed with a new set of words during a test phase. Block 2 was identical to Block 1 with the exception that after pronouncing each word aloud, participants made an additional decision (episodic recognition decision in Experiments 1 and 2 and animacy decision in Experiment 3). In the first two experiments, older adults showed disproportionate slowing in their response times to pronounce the words when they additionally had to make a recognition judgment afterward (Block 2) compared to when they only pronounced the words aloud (Block 1). Importantly, the difference between high-frequency and low-frequency words (the word frequency effect) was disproportionately attenuated for older adults in Block 2 compared to Block 1 and compared to younger adults. These results suggest that older adults experience greater cross-task bleeding than younger adults because word frequency has opposing effects in pronunciation and recognition tasks. As predicted, this age modulation of the word frequency effect in pronunciation performance was not replicated in Experiment 3 when participants made an animacy judgment, wherein word frequency effects act in concert with those of the pronunciation task. Discussion focuses on age-related differences in the ability to constrain attention to a current task. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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跨任务出血的年龄差异。

本研究调查了与年龄相关的限制对当前任务的注意力的能力差异，而不会受到即将到来的决定的污染（流血）。每个实验包括两个试验块。在 Block 1 中，参与者最初偶然编码了一个高频和低频词列表，然后他们在测试阶段大声读出与一组新词混合的研究词。块 2 与块 1 相同，不同之处在于，在大声朗读每个单词后，参与者做出了额外的决定（实验 1 和 2 中的情景识别决定以及实验 3 中的动画决定）。在前两个实验中，与仅大声朗读单词时（方框 1）相比，老年人在事后还必须做出识别判断（方框 2）时，他们朗读单词的反应时间显着减慢。重要的是，与 Block 1 和较年轻的成年人相比，Block 2 中老年人的高频和低频词之间的差异（词频效应）不成比例地减弱。这些结果表明，老年人比年轻人经历更多的跨任务出血，因为词频在发音和识别任务中具有相反的影响。正如预测的那样，当参与者做出生命力判断时，这种年龄调制对发音表现的词频效应没有在实验 3 中复制，其中词频效应与发音任务的效应一致。讨论的重点是限制对当前任务的注意力的能力与年龄相关的差异。（PsycInfo 数据库记录 (c) 2020 APA，保留所有权利）。