Mediated Priming in Younger and Older Adults

Abstract

This paper reports the result of a lexical decision experiment in which the primes were either directly related to their targets , mediated , or unrelated . Mediated primes are indirectly related to their targets through a single connecting link ( e . g ., PASTURE - COW - MILK ). Older and younger adult subjects responded to each letter string in a continuous lexical decision task , deciding whether each string was a word or a nonword . The results indicated that both younger and older subjects benefited from the mediated primes , as well as from the directly related primes . The results are discussed in relation to issues of age changes in processing speed .