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Aging and Implicit Learning of an Invariant Association

¹ Department of Psychology, Georgetown University, Washington, DC.
² Department of Neurology, Georgetown University, Washington, DC.
³ Department of Psychology, The Catholic University of America, Washington, DC.
⁴ Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina.
⁵ Mt. Hope Family Center, University of Rochester, New York.

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.

Key Words: Implicit learning • Invariant association • Nondeclarative learning