Aging and text-specific implicit memory

This study investigates the effects of aging on text-specific implicit memory. In Experiment 1, young and elderly subjects had to read three times in succession two different texts. Results show that text rereading facilitation is similar in young and elderly subjects, and that this facilitation is text specific. The purpose of Experiment 2 was to distinguish between the respective roles of perceptual and conceptual priming in young and elderly subjects in text rereading facilitation. The procedure was similar to Experiment 1, except that two different meaningless texts with exactly the same words were used. Here, the results show that, for the two groups, the first reading of the second text is faster than the first reading of the first text, which confirms the importance of perceptual priming in text rereading facilitation, but not as fast as the third reading of the first text. So, the data suggests that the combination of a perceptual and a low-level conceptual (associations between words) priming effect could underlie text rereading facilitation, and that these effects are preserved in aging.