CONCEPTUAL IMPLICIT MEMORY - A DEVELOPMENTAL-STUDY

The widely accepted standpoint that implicit memory emerges earlier in development than explicit memory, and is more stable from childhood t o adult age, is based on experimental data essentially collected in pe rceptual tasks. The present study was aimed at investigating whether t hese findings still hold when a more conceptual task is used. We compa red the performance of children at two age levels (2nd and 4th grades) on a category-exemplar generation task. Results showed that performan ces of the two groups were comparable when the target items were typic al of their categories, as in Experiment 2, and for a subset of the it ems in Experiment 1. However, the older children outperformed the youn ger children in Experiment 1 when the items selected were atypical of their categories. Interpretations of these findings are discussed.