Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, Vol 52, Issue 5 P229-P234, Copyright © 1997 by The Gerontological Society of America
Baseline performance and learning rate of procedural and declarative memory tasks: younger versus older adults
E Vakil and D Agmon-Ashkenazi
Psychology Department, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel. vakile@ashur.cc.biu.ac.il
Twenty-five older and 25 younger adults were compared on declarative (i.e.,
Rey Auditory-Verbal Learning Test and Visual Pair Associations) and
procedural (i.e., Tower of Hanoi puzzle and Porteus mazes) learning tasks.
A dissociation between learning rate on declarative and procedural tasks
was demonstrated for the elderly participants. The younger group showed a
steeper learning rate than the older group on the declarative tasks. By
contrast, the learning rate of both groups on the procedural tasks did not
differ consistently, whether the measure was number of errors/moves or time
elapsed (with one exception in which the older group showed a steeper
learning rate than the younger group). The younger group's baseline
performance was better than that of the older group on all tasks employed
in this study. These results reinforce the importance of distinguishing
between baseline performance and the rate of learning on procedural
learning tasks.
