Study: ability to multi-task wanes with age

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    Researchers used functional¹ magnetic（磁性的） resonance² imaging (FMRI) to analyze³ brain activity in 20 people over age 60 by asking them to contemplate⁴ outdoor photos shown briefly⁵.

    Then the elderly were presented with the picture of a face and asked to determine its gender⁶ and age, before being asked to recall details from the original scene they viewed.

    Researchers then compared their results to a similar experiment with 20 younger adults and found the brains of older subjects were less capable of disengaging from the interruption and reestablishing the neural⁷ connections necessary to switch back to focusing on the original memory.

    "Unlike younger individuals, older adults failed to both disengage from the interruption and re-establish functional connections associated with the disrupted memory network," write Wesley C. Clapp of the University of California, San Francisco, and colleagues in the Proceedings⁸ of the National Academy of Sciences.

    The study, published in the online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, sheds new lights into a growing body of studies showing that one's ability to move from one task to another in quick succession becomes more difficult with age.(本文由在线英语听力室整理编辑)

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