The Effects Of Text Constraint And Central Executive On Senior People's Predictive Inference Processing During Text Reading

Reading is a cognitive-demanding activity and inference is the most important psychological process during reading.Predictive inference is a kind of elaboration that requires a certain amount of cognitive resources and a certain level of text constraint.Central executive of working memory plays a vital role in cognitive resources allocation and information manipulation,which is crucial for information processing during reading.At the meantime,central executive is the component of working memory that most affected by cognitive aging.Although there are studies focusing on the effects of working memory on predictive inference,little is known about the role of different components of working memory,especially central executive,in predictive inference generation.What is more,although there are studies concerning about the text processing by senior people,little is known about senior people's predictive inference processing during reading comprehension.The present study aimed to investigate the following two questions:1)Does the text constraint level have effects on senior people's predictive inference processing during text reading?2)Do the three components of central executive have effects on senior people's predictive inference generation during text reading?The present study enrolled twenty-nine senior citizens whose age range from 60 to 70 years old in Beijing.The task-switching test,"n-back" task and Stroop task were employed to measure the three relatively independent function of central executive(shifting process,updating,inhibition)as an effective way to measure central executive as a whole.Probe-naming task was used to investigate the naming time under high and low text constraints and naming facilitation was obtained through subtracting the naming time under high text constraint from that under low text constraint.The three subcomponents of central executive were taken as independent variables and the naming facilitation was taken as dependent variable.Correlation analysis and multiple regression analysis were performed.E-Prime 3.0 was used to program and present the experiment materials and then record the response time(RT)and accuracy.Data were analyzed with the help of SPSS(Statistical Package for Social Sciences)23.0.Results indicated that there were text constraint effects among senior people.Naming time under high text constraint is significantly shorter than that under low text constraint.As for the role of central executive in senior people's predictive inference generation,inhibition ability and updating ability were found significantly correlated with naming facilitation caused by high text constraint condition.The former was positively correlated with naming facilitation and the latter was negatively correlated.No significant correlation was found between shifting ability and naming facilitation.In addition,the inhibition ability can expound the variance of naming facilitation to the largest extent,indicating that this ability can influence predictive inference generation most within central executive.Results of the present study partly supported the Constructionist theory,Minimalist Hypothesis and Memory-based text processing theory.Methodologically,the present study employed naming facilitation as the indicator to manifest the role of central executive in manipulating information and controlling attention.As for the examining of central executive,three independent tasks were employed to measure the three relatively independent sub-components of central executive,which can represent the central executive more comprehensively.The results of the present study stressed the importance of inhibition ability in predictive inference processing,which can provide some practical implications for maintaining senior group's reading ability.In addition,the examining of senior people's predictive inference processing can provide some references to the detection and measuring of cognitive aging.