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Abstract:
Abstract: Implicit memory for images of novel visual objects
was assessed over several study-to-test delay conditions in
college-aged and elderly volunteers. Participants studied distinct
sets of stimuli immediately before test, and at either 20 minutes,
90 minutes, or one week prior to test. At study, objects were
individually presented for 5 second exposures following which
participants indicated whether each faced primarily towards the
left, or to the right (viz. structural encoding). At test, images
from the two study epochs were randomly intermixed with non-studied
items and shown for brief durations, 200 msec for the elders, and
26 msec for the young. The young volunteers showed statistically
reliable priming for objects shown at both the immediate, 20, and
90 minute delay conditions. Preliminary results also show a trend
towards priming for objects viewed one week earlier. In contrast,
elders showed reliable priming only for objects shown in the
immediate study condition. These results suggest that memory
representations accessed by this implicit memory procedure become
less robust in the elderly, perhaps because of less efficient
encoding.
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