EFFECTS OF AGING ON IMPLICIT SEQUENCE LEARNING - ACCOUNTING FOR SEQUENCE STRUCTURE AND EXPLICIT KNOWLEDGE

The present research was intended to examine the sequence learning abi lity of elderly people - with a focus on comparing sequences with diff erent structural characteristics and on properly assessing explicit kn owledge. Experiment 1 showed that learning-related 'improvements in se rial reaction time task performance were greater for young than elderl y subjects, and elderly subjects were especially poor at learning a se quence with complex structural characteristics. Measures of recognitio n memory showed that neither young nor elderly subjects showed above-c hance explicit knowledge of the sequences. Experiment 2 was designed t o test the validity and sensitivity of the explicit recognition measur es by comparing young subjects in groups given all random trials, give n sequence trials with implicit instructions, or given sequence trials with explicit instructions. Experiment 2 confirmed the sensitivity of the recognition measures to explicit knowledge, so it is concluded th at group effects in Exp. 1 reflect age-related differences in implicit learning.