title: Aging and implicit learning of an invariant association.
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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Georgetown University, 37th and P Streets NW, Washington, DC 20057, USA. howardd@georgetown.edu
authors.forename: Darlene V
authors.initials: DV
authors.lastname: Howard
authors.forename: James H
authors.initials: JH
authors.lastname: Howard
authors.forename: Nancy A
authors.initials: NA
authors.lastname: Dennis
authors.forename: Sean
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: LaVine
authors.forename: Kristin
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Valentino
mesh_terms: D000222:Adaptation, Physiological; D000223:Adaptation, Psychological; D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D000368:Aged; D000375:Aging / Q000502:physiology*; D001244:Association; D004777:Environment; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007858:Learning; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory; D011939:Mental Recall; D014705:Verbal Behavior