Aging and implicit learning of an invariant association.

Full Abstract

We investigated whether there is an age-related decline in implicit learning of an invariant association. Participants memorized letter strings in which a given letter always occurred in the second position (see Frick & Lee, 1995). Experiments 1 and 2 showed that young and older adults learned this regularity implicitly, with no significant age differences, even when a perceptual feature of the stimuli changed between encoding and test. Experiment 3 confirmed that learning had occurred during encoding, in that learning increased with the number of encoding presentations. We conclude that implicit learning of this invariant association is largely preserved in healthy aging, revealing another avenue by which older people continue to adapt efficiently to environmental regularities.

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Author information

Author/s: Howard, Darlene V (DV); Howard, James H (JH); Dennis, Nancy A (NA); LaVine, Sean (S); Valentino, Kristin (K);

Affiliation: Department of Psychology, Georgetown University, 37th and P Streets NW, Washington, DC 20057, USA. howardd@georgetown.edu

Grants: R37 AG 15450 (Agency:United States NIA)

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article; Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural

Journal: The journals of gerontology. Series B, Psychological sciences and social sciences (J Gerontol B Psychol Sci Soc Sci), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2008-Mar; vol 63 (issue 2) : pp P100-5

Dates: Created 2008/04/28; Completed 2008/06/10;

PMID: 18441263, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 11/6/2008)

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MeSH headings (categories)

This article was linked to the MESH Headings shown below.

Environment
Female
Humans
Learning
Male
Memory
Mental Recall
Verbal Behavior

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