The Research On The Effect Of Inhibition Training On The Elderly

Better cognitive performance can help old people to maintain their independent lives and improve their quality of life,but current researches on personality and cognitive aging find that there is cognitive aging in the elderly.cognitive aging is the cognitive impairment,so it's important to find some reasonable way to delay or rehabilitate cognitive decline in the aging.As to working memory(WM)and attention shift,inhibition is a central component of executive function.Some research found that inhibition training had transfer of training effects to performance on task assessing response working memory,task-switching and so on.Through analysis and collection of literature about inhibition intervention,we find there are still some inadequacies : firstly,participants in most inhibition training programs are children or young people,not the elderly people who have cognitive decline;Secondly,even though some researches conclude that inhibition intervention could improve other cognitive task performance,there is still no research showing that if it also has transfer of training effects on prospective memory tasks or sustained attention tasks and the transfer of training effects' long-term effects;Finally,as we all know,inhibition play an important role in prospective memory and sustained attention,but what roles does inhibition play in different stages of prospective memory ? And in the period of cognitive decline,is there also significant relationship between inhibition and sustained attention?Therefore,on the basis of previous researches,in the present study we would recruit volunteers(80 healthy elders in the experiment 1,38 healthy elders in the experiment 2)and use experimental research methods with Simon task,two kinds of prospective memory tasks which adopt adjustment based on the present study,and continuous performance tasks to explore these issues.The results showed that:Experiment 1:1.The performance of Simon task has significant correlation with perspective memory-picture task in accuracy(p<0.01)and reaction time(p<0.01).It indicates that in the stage of finding prospective memory's cue,inhibition controls on-going task from taking up all cognitive resources.In this way,people could have some cognitive resources to monitor perspective memory's cue.2.The performance of Simon task has significant correlation with perspective memory Stroop task in accuracy(p<0.01)and reaction time p<0.01).It indicates that after the stage of finding prospective memory's cue,inhibition stops the on-going task in order to complete the prospective memory task.3.The performance of Simon task has significant correlation with continuous performance task in accuracy(p<0.01)and reaction time(p<0.01).The result shows that inhibition still play an important role in sustained attention when people enter the stage of aging.Experiment 2:There's no significant difference between training group and control group in per-test of all tasks(p>0.05),the result shows that there's no difference before training.After being intervened,we found that:1.In the Simon task,compared with control group reaction time of task isbetter in the training group(p<0.05)in the post-test and tracking survey.Andthere's no significant difference between performance of post-test and trackingsurvey in the training group.2.In the perspective memory task 1,compared with control group,accuracy ofperspective memory part is better in the training group(p<0.05)in the post-testand tracking survey.The accuracy in tracking survey is better than per-test,butworse than post-test in the training group.Compared with control group,accuracyof on-going part is better in the training group(p<0.05)in the post-test.Butthere's no difference significant difference per-test and tracking survey in thetraining group.3.In the perspective memory task 2,compared with control group,reactiontime of perspective memory part is better in the training group(p<0.05)in thepost-test and tracking survey.And there's no significant difference betweenperformance of post-test and tracking survey in the training group.4.Errors of commission in training group are lower than control group(p<0.05)in the post-test,there's no significant difference between performance oftraining group and control group in the tracking survey.Conclusion:1.Inhibition plays a different role in different stages of perspective memory.In particular,before the stage that perspective memory's cues appear,it inhibits on going task taking up all of cognitive resource in order to have a certain amount of cognitive resource to monitor the cues;after fingding perspective memory cues,it inhibits on going task in order to do the perspective memory task.2.When people enter the stage of aging,inhibition still correlates significantly with sustained attention,although both of them decline with aging.3.Inhibition training could improve the ability of inhibition of the elder and transfer effect is found in both perspective memory and sustained attention.3.Long lived transfer effect of inhibition intervention is only found in inhibition and perspective memory,but not found in sustained attention.