title: The status of rapid response learning in aging.
abstract: Strong evidence exists for an age-related impairment in associative processing under intentional encoding and retrieval conditions, but the status of incidental associative processing has been less clear. In 2 experiments, we examined the effects of age on rapid response learning-the incidentally learned stimulus-response association that results in a reduction in priming when a learned response becomes inappropriate for a new task. Specifically, we tested whether priming was equivalently sensitive in both age groups to reversal of the task-specific decision cue. Experiment 1 showed that cue inversion reduced priming in both age groups with a speeded inside/outside classification task, and in Experiment 2, cue inversion eliminated priming on an associative version of this task. Thus, the ability to encode an association between a stimulus and its initial task-specific response appears to be preserved in aging. These findings provide an important example of a form of associative processing that is unimpaired in older adults.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC, USA. ilana.dew@duke.edu
authors.forename: Ilana T Z
authors.initials: IT
authors.lastname: Dew
authors.forename: Kelly S
authors.initials: KS
authors.lastname: Giovanello
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D000375:Aging / Q000502:physiology / Q000523:psychology*; D001245:Association Learning / Q000502:physiology*; D003463:Cues; D006801:Humans; D008875:Middle Aged; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D011930:Reaction Time; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis; D013997:Time Factors; D055815:Young Adult