DISSOCIATION OF IMPLICIT AND EXPLICIT MEMORY TESTS - EFFECT OF AGE AND DIVIDED ATTENTION ON CATEGORY EXEMPLAR GENERATION AND CUED-RECALL

In this article, we report an experiment that provides further evidenc e concerning the differences between explicit and implicit measures of memory. The effects of age and divided attention on the implicit conc eptual test of category exemplar generation (CEG) were compared with t heir effects on the explicit test of cued recall, where the category n ames served as cues in both tasks. Four age groups (20-35, 40-55, 60-7 5, and 76-90) were compared. Half of the subjects were also required t o carry out a secondary letter-detection task during the learning phas e. Cued recall performance was significantly impaired by increased age and imposition of the secondary task. In contrast, the CEG task was u naffected by these two factors. These results suggest that implicit co nceptual tasks and explicit memory tasks are mediated by different pro cesses. This conclusion opposes those of previous studies that showed that experimental manipulations (level of processing, generation, orga nization) influenced these two kinds of memory tests in a similar way.