Building episodic connections: changes in episodic priming with age and dementia.
Previous studies of associative encoding that used explicit retrieval tasks have shown both age- and dementia of the Alzheimer type (DAT)-related declines, but such results may be biased by group differences in explicit retrieval. In the present experiment, the authors assessed implicit associative encoding for 25 younger adults (ages 18-25), 73 healthy older adults (ages 59-91), and 65 adults with DAT (ages 59-91) during a speeded word-naming task using an episodic priming measure. Episodic priming refers to the facilitation in responding to a target word after repetition of both words in a prime-target pair, in comparison with simple repetition of the target word with a new prime on each presentation. In contrast with other studies of implicit associative encoding that did not use an implicit episodic priming measure, the present study found both age- and DAT-related declines in associative encoding under conditions of massed learning trials.
Faust
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ME
Department of Psychology, University of South Alabama, Mobile 36688-0002, USA. mfaust@usamail.usouthal.edu
Balota
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DA
Spieler
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DH
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D000544:Alzheimer Disease / Q000523:psychology*; D001288:Attention; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall; D008875:Middle Aged; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D010153:Paired-Associate Learning; D011594:Psychometrics; D012016:Reference Values