Aging and the priming of newly learned associations.

In each of two experiments, 32 young (18-25 years) and 32 elderly (63-79 years) adults studied 36 sentences of the form NOUNI-VERB-NOUN2. Then they made item-recognition judgments regarding whether single nouns had occurred in the sentences. After two or more presentations of each sentence, both young and elderly people showed equivalent priming between the nouns within the sentences; a noun was recognized faster when it was tested immediately after the other noun from the same sentence than when it was tested following a noun from a different sentence. After only one presentation of each sentence, young individuals showed priming but elderly did not. Under all study conditions, young people were superior to the elderly in cued recall of the same sentences. It is argued that priming provides a sensitive measure of what is stored in memory and so will be useful for studies of aging.