ABSTRACT

Knowledge on statistical learning (SL) in healthy elderly is scarce. Theoretically, it is not clear whether aging affects modality-specific and/or domain-general learning mechanisms. Practically, there is a lack of research on simplified SL tasks, which would ease the burden of testing in clinical populations. Against this background, we conducted two experiments across three modalities (auditory, visual and visuomotor) in a total of 93 younger and older adults. In Experiment 1, SL was induced in all modalities. Aging effects appeared in the tasks relying on an explicit posttest to assess SL. We hypothesize that declines in domain-general processes that predominantly modulate explicit learning mechanisms underlie these aging effects. In Experiment 2, more feasible tasks were developed for which the level of SL was maintained in all modalities, except the auditory modality. These tasks are more likely to successfully measure SL in elderly (patient) populations in which task demands can be problematic.

摘要

健康老年人的统计学习 (SL) 知识很少。从理论上讲，尚不清楚老化是否会影响特定模态和/或领域通用的学习机制。实际上，缺乏对简化 SL 任务的研究，这将减轻临床人群的测试负担。在此背景下，我们对总共 93 名年轻人和老年人进行了两项跨三种模式（听觉、视觉和视觉运动）的实验。在实验 1 中，SL 在所有模式中都被诱导。老化效应出现在依赖显式后测评估 SL 的任务中。我们假设主要调节外显学习机制的领域一般过程的下降是这些老化效应的基础。在实验 2 中，开发了更多可行的任务，在所有模式中都保持 SL 水平，除了听觉形态。这些任务更有可能在任务需求可能存在问题的老年人（患者）人群中成功测量 SL。