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. Copyright 2008 by The Gerontological Society of America.