Background Music Jams Memory in Older Adults
听音乐并不能让人更专注
People of all ages find background sound distracting, but noise appears to impede memory formation in older people. Erika Beras reports
背景声音对所有人来说几乎都是分心事物，它甚至会阻碍老年人记忆的形成。
撰文/播音 埃里卡·贝拉斯(Erika Beras)
翻译 李轩
If you’re a senior citizen, music in the background may be distracting. But for younger people—experts at multitasking—it’s apparently no big deal. That’s according to a study in the journal Gerontologist.
如果你是一名老年人，背景音乐很可能给你带来麻烦。但对于擅长多任务处理的年轻人来说，却没什么大碍。一项发表在《老年学》期刊上的论文如是说。
Researchers recruited 103 people—half between the ages of 18 and 30, the others between 60 and 75. The volunteers then took part in memorization exercises and a drill where they had to quickly match a photo of a face with the same face in an array of unfamiliar faces. Some participants did the exercises in silence. Others performed the tasks while listening to white noise or instrumental jazz, blues, classical and electronic music.
研究人员雇用了103人参与这项研究，其中一半年龄在18到30岁之间，另一半在60到75岁之间。实验中，参与者被要求参加一个记忆训练——在一系列不认识的脸中找到与给定照片中相同的脸。一些参与者在安静的环境中训练，而别外的人在白噪声或者爵士乐、蓝调乐、古典乐及电子乐中完成任务。
Across age groups, the consensus was that the background sound was distracting – but only older people’s performance suffered when the noise was present.
在各个年龄层，背景声音普遍会使人分心，但只有老年人的表现会受到严重影响。
For example, older folks who did the face-matching with music playing remembered 10 percent fewer faces. The result matches up with the theory that the elderly are less able to filter out what’s called “distracting task-irrelevant information.” In this case the distracting info might have interfered with them storing the facial image in the first place—much less impeding their ability to remember it a short while later.
例如，老年人在有背景音乐的环境中只能记住10%或更少的脸。这个结果符合此前认为老年人无法过滤与任务不相干信息的理论。不过在这个实验中，无关信息虽然会妨碍他们对脸部的短期记忆，但对后期记忆的影响会减弱。
京ICP备11000850号-1 
京公网安备11010502039775号
信息网络传播视听节目许可证0111611号
国家科技基础条件平台
© 2011- 版权所有：中国数字科技馆 未经书面许可任何人不得复制或镜像
京公网安备11010502039775号 
