岁月带走记忆的秘密
编辑：lyn
来源： livescinece
一项新研究发现，老年人会很难做到不去理会一些毫不相干的事，但这种注意力的分散实际上能提高他们的记忆力。
“每个人都会不同程度上的分心，”一个来自多伦多大学的心理博士，卡伦坎·贝尔(Karen Campbell)说，“我们通常认为情况会因为年龄的增长而越来越糟。”
这项新研究表明，虽然分心会影响我们处理手头的工作，但同时老年人可能会因此而接收到更多信息。再准确点儿，通过对他们眼前同时出现的不同信息的绑定，老年人拥有了独一无二的“超链接”这些无关紧要信息的能力。
这个研究结果至少能部分解释为什么智慧会随着年龄的增长而增长。
“这可能是老年人和经常会注意力分散的人的一丝希望，”多伦多的罗曼特研究所(Rotman Research Institute)的琳恩·哈什尔(Lynn Hasher)说，她同时也是参与此次研究的资深科学家，“渐渐失去控制注意能力的老年人似乎比年轻人更了解环境中那些看似无关的共生现象。”
研究人员猜想这种记忆模式或许可以帮助老年人更好的作出决定或者解决问题。比如，当一个经理想要提拔某个员工，他将这个员工的工作效绩和此人与其他职员之间的互动结合起来考量或许对他的决定更有帮助。
事实上，对孩子们来说分心其实能帮助他们更好的接收周围的信息。坎贝尔说“他们像海绵一样吸收一切信息，然后在对他们学习上有帮助的信息之间寻找某种联系。”
这个研究小组邀请了24位年轻人（年龄在17~29）和24位老年人（年龄在60~73）在电脑上完成记忆测试。首先，让参与者观看一系列图片，每一张图片上都写着一个与此图无关的单词，比方说一张画着小鸟的图上印着“跳”。参与者被告知只需要注意图画的内容。他们要完成的任务就是在看见某张图片第二次出现时按下空格键。
测试结束后他们休息了十分钟，之后他们又完成了一个于此类似的测试。但此次出现了三种不同的图文的组合：第一种是他们在之间的的测试中所见过的那些；第二种是取此前测试中的图但配上不同的单词；第三种是新的图文组合。
研究人员认为如果分心能使老年人既记住了无关的信息（图片上叠加的文字），又把那些文字与特定的图片联系起来的话，那么老年参与者在测试中的表现应该更好。事实正是如此。
在回忆那些先前的图文组合（第一次测试中的图文组合）相对于新的组合方面，老年参与者要比年轻参与者高出30%的正确率。对于年轻人来说，他们对所有三种组合的记忆没有什么实质上的不同。
“在日常生活中，除非我们用水晶球或者其他什么方式来预测，我们根本不知道什么东西能在以后派的上用场”坎贝尔告诉《生活科学》的记者，“关于记忆，就如进化的观点所言——用过去的经验来帮助我们更好的走向未来。”
这项研究将会详细的刊登在本周的《心理科学》。
Older adults may have a tough time tuning out irrelevant information, but this lack of focus can actually boost their memory, a new study finds.
"Everybody differs in their ability to ignore distracting information," said Karen Campbell, a doctoral student in psychology at the University of Toronto. "Our view is that as we get older this tends to get worse."
While this lack of focus can get in the way of the task at hand, the new study suggests seniors might sometimes take in more information. More specifically, they have the unique ability to "hyper-bind" the irrelevant information, essentially tying it to other information that is appearing at the same time.
The result could explain, in part, why wisdom comes with age.
"This could be a silver lining to aging and distraction," said Lynn Hasher of the Rotman Research Institute in Toronto, and senior scientist on the study. "Older adults with reduced attentional regulation seem to display greater knowledge of seemingly extraneous co-occurrences in the environment than younger adults."
This type of memory could help older adults with decision-making and problem-solving, the researchers suspect. For instance, if a manager wants to promote an employee, it might be helpful to recall not just that employee’s work performance, but also his interaction with other employees.
In fact, this same inability to focus attention can be useful to children so they can take in all the information around them. "Their job is to absorb everything like a sponge and try to learn links between things that can help them in general learning," Campbell said.
The research team had 24 younger adults, ages 17 to 29, and just as many older adults (ages 60 to 73) complete memory tasks on a computer. First, participants looked at a series of pictures, each of which was superimposed with an irrelevant word, such as a picture of a bird and the word "jump." Participants were told to ignore the words and focus only on the pictures. The goal was to press the space bar on a keyboard whenever they saw a picture twice in a row.
After this task and a 10-minute break, participants completed a similar task. But this time they were shown three kinds of picture-word pairs: picture-word pairs they had seen in the earlier task; disrupted pairs with the same pictures from the previous task but with different words; and new picture-word pairs.
The researchers figured if lack of focus was leading older adults to not only remember the extraneous information (superimposed words), but also that these words were tied to certain pictures, these participants should do better at those pairs they’d seen before. And that's exactly what they found.
The older adults showed a 30-percent advantage over younger adults in their memory for the preserved pairs (the picture-word pairs from the first task) relative to the new pairs. For young adults, there was no real difference in their performance for all three pair types.
"In your day to day life you never know what information is going to be helpful to you later on unless you are blessed with a crystal ball or something," Campbell told LiveScience. "That's the point of memory from an evolutionary perspective – you want to use your past experience to help you in the future."
The study is detailed online this week in the journal Psychological Science.
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