ABSTRACT

Aging impairs visual associative memories. Up to date, little is known about whether aging impairs auditory associative memories. Using the head-related-transfer function to induce perceived spatial locations of auditory phonemes, this study used an audiospatial paired-associates-learning (PAL) paradigm to assess the auditory associative memory for phoneme-location pairs in both younger and older adults. Both aging groups completed the PAL task with various levels of difficulty, which were defined by the number of items to be remembered. The results showed that compared with younger participants' performance, older participants passed fewer stages and had lower capacity of auditory associative memory. For maintaining a single audiospatial pair, no significant behavioral differences between the two aging grous werefound. However, when multiple sound-location pairs were required to be remembered, older adults made more errors and demonstrated a lower working memory capacity than younger adults. Our study indicates aging impairs audiospatial associative learning and memory.

摘要

衰老会损害视觉联想记忆。迄今为止，人们对衰老是否会损害听觉联想记忆知之甚少。使用头部相关传递函数来诱导听觉音素的感知空间位置，本研究使用音频空间配对联想学习 (PAL) 范式来评估年轻人和老年人的音素位置对的听觉联想记忆。两个年龄组都以不同的难度完成了 PAL 任务，这些难度由要记住的项目数量来定义。结果表明，与年轻参与者的表现相比，年长参与者通过的阶段较少，听觉联想记忆能力较低。对于维持单个音频空间对，没有发现两个老化的 grous 之间的显着行为差异。然而，当需要记住多个声音位置对时，老年人比年轻人犯更多的错误并且表现出较低的工作记忆能力。我们的研究表明，衰老会损害听觉空间联想学习和记忆。