| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 心理學研究所 === 93 === Review of literature shows that deficits of temporal order memory have often been evident in patients with lesions of the prefrontal lobe. Since a large body of studies indicates that the negative impact of aging process on the prefrontal lobe is greater than on other brain areas, it would be expected that older adults might also have difficulty in remembering the temporal order of events. In fact, some studies revealed that older adults manifested such a memory problem, which was associated with age-related prefrontal lobe dysfunction. However, methodological drawbacks, such as confounding variables of the demographical data and content memory problem might contribute to these findings. Thus, the author made an attempt to minimize these pitfalls in the present study, in order to explore the temporal order memory function in normal aging and the possible underlying neuropsychological mechanism.
Thirty normal older adults and 30 normal young controls matched for the sex, education level and VIQ of the WAIS-R were participated in the study. All subjects received a battery of neuropsychological tests, a temporal order memory task, and a recognition memory task.
The results revealed that, (1) the temporal order memory function in normal aging was worse than in their normal young counterparts. (2) Age-related temporal order memory deficits were possibly related to age-related prefrontal function change. (3) Semantic similarity impaired temporal order memory in normal aging. It was suggested that deficits in inhibitory control of interference could result in temporal order memory problem. (4) Moreover, results of the temporal order memory task revealed that true memory and false memory in normal aging were dissociable.
Based on the present results, it appeared that the prefrontal lobe function, such as temporal order memory, was compromised in normal aging, while the temporal lobe function, such as semantic memory, was relatively spared. However, since the possible neurological mechanism underlying temporal order memory was inferred by results of correlation and regression analysis, further investigation on this issue with structural or functional neuroimaging procedures is merited.
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