| With the aggravation of the aging population in China,the cognitive aging of the older adults has become one of the most important issues of psychology which should be paid more attention at present time.The cognitive abilities,such as attention,reading and memory,are gradually declined with aging.Reading is one of the most important cognitive activities of the older adults,being impaired with the decline of cognition,which seriously affects the daily life and self-worth of the older adults.Relevant studies have found that,readers can identify the key content of the text and construct the structural representation of the text with the help of text signals,thus promoting text comprehension and information retention.Therefore,text signals have become a very effective method to improve reading quality.Are article markers able to improve the reading efficiency and quality of the older adults?In addition,the mechanism of text signals is still under debate.Strategy-switch hypothesis suggested that readers change their reading strategies because of text signals,in other words,the way readers encode information has changed.Common-strategy hypothesis proposed that readers still use the same reading strategies even if the text signals are introduced.The text signals only improve the accessibility of information.If article markers are able to improve older adults' reading efficiency,then what is the unerlying mechanism?There are very few studies investigating this issue at present.We conducted two experiments to explore the effect of text signals on the text comprehension of the older adults and the mechanism.In experiment 1,we explored the age effet on Chinese discourse reading.24 younger adults and 24 older adults partcipants took part in the experiment,Four scientific explanations were used as reading materials.The aging phenomenon of the older adults at three levels of reading comprehension was investigated by using Schmalhofer and Glavanov(1986)signal detection paradigm.The results showed that the young adults had better memory in the surface representation and the textbase representation than the older adults,and the older adults had the same ability in the situation model as the young adults.In experiment 2,24 younger adults and 24 older adults were selected as subjects.A 2(age:young,old)by 3(signal:macro-signals,micro-signals,no signals)mixed design was used to investigate the effect of text signals on the text reading for younger and older adults.We also used the eye tracking technology to explore the mechanism of text signals on readins.The results showed that there were significant age differences in the discrimination of surface form,the average fixation duration,the total fixation duration,the reading speed and the forward saccadic length of the whole article,the first fixation duration and gaze duration of micro-markers.The specific manifestation was that the discrimination of surface form of young adults was significantly better than that of older adults,and the older adults reading longer,read slower,and saccade shorter.The saccadic length was shorter,and the first fixation duration and gaze duration were longer.There are significant signaled differences in surface form and textbase form,gaze duration and regression duration of topic sentences.Un-signals and macro-signals are better than micro-signals in discriminating surface formal information,while micro-signals are better than macro-signals in discriminating textbase information.Simple effect analysis showed that there was no significant aging difference under un-signals condition,but significant aging difference under micro-signals condition.The results of experiment 1 and experiment 2,suggested that macro-signals and micro-signals promoted the text comprehension of older adults,and changed the text information processing strategy supports the strategy-switch hypothesis of text signals effect. |
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