The Effects of Aging and Tumor on Source Retrieval

With healthy young adults, healthy old adults(which was hereafter termed as elders) and tumor patients with no pathological changes in brain(which was hereafter designated as patients) as participants, this study compared the performance of the item recognition task with that of the location source retrieval using unfamiliar human faces as stimuli among these groups. The results showed that (1) except the non-target-old faces, both of healthy groups performed better for the item recognition task than they did at the source retrieval stage, and the accuracy of other faces was much lower for the elders compared with that of the younger adults, however, the difference of the corresponding reaction times for these types of faces did not reach significance between these two groups; and (2) except the non-target-new faces, the difference of the accuracy for other faces did not approach statistical significance between the patients and the elders, and the corresponding reaction times were much slower in the former group. These findings indicate that aging can influence both the item recognition and the source retrieval tasks obviously, and much stronger on the latter one. Compared with other symptoms due to brain damage or lesion, the disease of tumor in the present study shows no prominent effects on the accuracy of the source retrieval task.