One-Trial Associative Priming of Nonwords in Young and Older Adults

In this article, three experiments in which single-trial associative priming for nonwords was investigated in young and older adults in a pronunciation task are reported. During an encoding task, associative priming was observed for young and older adults, although cued recall was near zero for both...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Psychology and aging 1996-09, Vol.11 (3), p.417-430
Main Authors: Light, Leah L, Kennison, Robert, Prull, Matthew W, Voie, Donna La, Zuelling, Andrea
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Adult. Elderly
Age Differences
Age Factors
Aged
Associative priming
Attention
Biological and medical sciences
Developmental psychology
Experiments
Female
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Human
Humans
Language
Male
Memory
Middle Aged
Nonwords
Older people
Psychology
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Semantic Priming
Word Association Tests
Word Associations
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Summary:In this article, three experiments in which single-trial associative priming for nonwords was investigated in young and older adults in a pronunciation task are reported. During an encoding task, associative priming was observed for young and older adults, although cued recall was near zero for both groups. Associative priming for young and older adults was found under full attention conditions, but when attention was divided at study, associative priming was observed in Experiment 3, but not in Experiment 2. Divided attention also disrupted recognition memory for new associations in young and older adults. The results limit the generality of findings of age-related decrements in associative priming by showing an absence of such decrements in tasks that do not require elaborative processing during encoding. They also argue against G. Musen and L. Squire's (1993) suggestion that formation of new connections in implicit memory requires multiple study opportunities, whereas declarative memory is specialized for rapid acquisition of new associations.
ISSN:0882-7974
1939-1498
DOI:10.1037/0882-7974.11.3.417