DOES AGING AFFECT IMMEDIATE AND DELAYED IMPLICIT MEMORY PERFORMANCE?

Abstract

Introduction: The main objective of this study is to investigate the effects of the instruction type (implicit vs explicit), testing time (immediate vs delay) and concreteness level of the words (concrete vs abstract) on word-stem completion scores. Materials and Method: The data has been collected from 95 volunteers; 49 young and 46 elderly adults. While the same the word-stem completion task is used in order to measure the implicit and explicit memory performance, different instructions are used to deduce the different memory kinds. Results: In the light of ANOVA results, the main and interaction effects of the age, instruction type, testing time and concreteness level in the WSC scores are investigated. The ANOVA results show that main effects of the age, instruction type, testing time and concreteness level of the words on the WSC task scores are found significant. Conclusion: The results shown that younger adults beter than older adults, implicit memory better than explicit memory, immediate test beter than delay testing time and studied words beter than non-studied words on WSC performance. Finally, immediate and delay implicit memory effected by aging.