D. Ε. Broadbent1, Alastair Heron2
1Applied Psychology Research Unit, Medical Research Council, Cambridge
2Occupational Aspects of Ageing Research Unit, Medical Research Council, Liverpool
Tóm tắt
Many practical situations expect a man to seek out and respond to signals, while at the same time remembering which signal is the one now requiring response. Most situations devised by psychologists, on the other hand, examine either reaction to signals without memory, or memory without reaction. A task has been devised in which both functions are involved. It consists of sets of random numbers which are observed through a small slot allowing only a few numbers at a time to be visible. The subject has to cross out particular digits, and has to remember which digit he is seeking at any particular instant. This type of task is compared with a more conventional number crossing task in which the subject has to find all instances of one particular digit, and both types of task are performed with and without an additional auditory distraction. In the present experiment, conducted with groups of young and of old subjects, it was found that the tasks involving memory are very vulnerable to distraction. The older subjects differed greatly among themselves, some being seriously inferior in performance to younger subjects; no such difference in variance appears in the similar task without memory load. When a distracting task is presented together with a main task involving memory, older subjects do very badly at one or the other, whereas young subjects do reasonably at both.
