The Status of Rapid Response Learning in Aging

Strong evidence exists for an age related impairment in associative processing under intentional encoding and retrieval conditions but the status of incidental associative processing has been less clear In 2 experiments we examined the effects of age on rapid response learning the incidentally learned stimulus response association that results in a reduction in priming when a learned response becomes inappropriate for a new task Specifically we tested whether priming was equivalently sensitive in both age groups to reversal of the task specific decision cue Experiment 1 showed that cue inversion reduced priming in both age groups with a speeded inside/outside classification task and in Experiment 2 cue inversion eliminated priming on an associative version of this task Thus the ability to encode an association between a stimulus and its initial task specific response appears to be preserved in aging These findings provide an important example of a form of associative processing that is unimpaired in older adults