PROCEDURAL AND DECLARATIVE MEMORY - A DEVELOPMENTAL-STUDY

Measures of procedural and declarative memory were administered to 88 children forming two groups, aged 8 and 12. Two measures of priming, G ollin Figures and Degraded Words, were compared to declarative measure s of recall. Strong support for a developmental dissociation between p riming tasks and declarative memory was found. Both age groups showed a similar amount of priming facilitation, yet a significant age effect was observed for the declarative recall tasks. Current findings demon strate that the level of procedural memory performance stabilizes duri ng a period of development when declarative memory continues to improv e. (C) 1994 Academic Press, Inc.