| Abstract: | To investigate the effect of aging on the fexibility of implicit memory, the current study compared the performance of elderly and young participants on semantic decision tasks in which the processing task or the stimulus format was varied across study and test. In Experiment 1, the required semantic decision (i.e., size judgments vs. corner judgments) either remained the same or was varied from study to test. In Experiment 2, the stimulus format of the item (i.e., pictures vs. words) either remained the same or was varied. Elderly participants demonstrated normal priming effects, and equivalent transfer across manipulations of processing task and across manipulations of stimulus format, despite showing a deficit in recognition memory compared with young participants. The results suggest that aging does not infuence the fexibility of implicit memory. |
