ARE IMPLICIT MEMORY DEFICITS IN THE ELDERLY DUE TO DIFFERENCES IN EXPLICIT MEMORY PROCESSES

We report an experiment that examined the cause of the memory deficit observed in elderly subjects on implicit tests of memory. Young and el derly subjects studied visually and auditorily presented words under s emantic and nonsemantic encoding conditions. Following the study phase , memory was tested with auditory and visual word fragment completion tasks. Elderly subjects priming scores were significantly lower than y oung subjects' scores. More importantly, it was observed that whereas young subjects showed an advantage of semantic encoding over nonsemant ic encoding, elderly subjects did not. Furthermore, the benefit of a s tudy test match in sensory modality was reduced in elderly subjects. T hese results indicate that the implicit memory deficit in elderly subj ects is attributable to deficiencies in both implicit and explicit mem ory processes.