A dissociation between verbal and pictorial implicit memory in an elderly population
Date
1988
Authors
O'Sullivan, Catherine Deirdre
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Abstract
Current research indicates that, although older people show impaired performance, relative to young people, on standard tasks of explicit memory, i.e. recognition, cued recall and free recall, they perform as well as young people on tasks of implicit memory. In this study, performance of old and young subjects was compared on an explicit free recall task and on two implicit memory tasks; word fragment completion and picture fragment completion. As expected, on the free recall task performance of old subjects was impaired relative to young subjects for pictures and words. In addition, there were no age related decrements in performance on the implicit verbal task. In contrast, on the implicit pictorial task clear age related differences emerged with the older subjects performing more poorly than the young subjects. Further, manipulations of frequency and familiarity had no differential effect on performance for either group on the implicit tasks. In addition, there was a significant correlation for old, but not young, subjects between the picture completion task and a standard visual perceptual task.
IMPLICIT MEMORY
These findings suggest that, at least some components of implicit memory and specifically pictorial memory, may show an age related decline. The results are discussed in terms of a material specific, component processing approach to memory function.