Mediated priming in younger and older adults

This paper reports the result of a lexical decision experiment in which the primes were either directly related to their targets, mediated, or unrelat ed. Mediated primes are indirectly related to their targets through a singl e connecting link (e.g., PASTURE-COW-MILK). Older and younger adult subject s responded to each letter string in a continuous lexical decision task, de ciding whether each string was a word or a nonword. The results indicated t hat both younger and older subjects benefited from the mediated primes, as well as from the directly related primes. The results are discussed in rela tion to issues of age changes in processing speed.