The Effect Of Bilateral Eyemovements On The Episodic Memory Deficit Of Old Adults

Episodic memory is a memory system contrasting with semantic memory. Episodic memory is a neurocognitive system, is compose of three elements of self, autonoetic awareness and sense of subjective time, and is mainly located prefrontal cortex. Being different from semantic memory systems, episodic memory enables human beings to remember past experiences, and autonoetic awareness is the main difference between episodic memory and semantic memory. The recognition test of R/K judgement is a main study paradigm for measuring episodic memory recently. In the Stephen D.Christman etl.'s studies, they suggested that the bilateral horizontal saccadic eye could enhance the retrieval of older adults'episodic memory. Whatmore, in the memory field, the memory aging is aways one of problems that are concerned by researchers. Recently the associative deficit hypothesis is an important theory for explaining the phenomena of older adults'episodic memory deficits. In our study, we evaluated the phenomena of older adults'episodic memory deficits ,by using the the recognition test of R/K judgement. The results of three experiments show, that the associative deficit hypothesis is supported in the condition of Chinese characters materials, which proved one important component of older adults'poorer episodic memory is their deficiency in creating and retrieving links between single units of information(in the experiment1), and bilateral horizontal saccadic eye movements may enhance the retrieval of older adults'episodic memory for items(in the experiment2) and the semantic associations between items(in the experiment3), which suggests bilateral horizontal saccadic eye movements may become one way of improving older adults'episodic memory.