Age differences in implicit learning of higher order dependencies in serial patterns.

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Abstract
3 experiments examined serial pattern learning in younger and older adults. Unlike the usual repeating pattern, the sequences alternated between events from a repeating pattern and those determined randomly. The results indicated that no one was able to describe the regularity, but with practice every individual in all 3 age groups (including old old) became faster, more accurate, or both, on pattern trials than on random trials. Although this indicates that adults of all ages are able to learn second-order statistical dependencies in a sequence, age-related deficits were obtained in the magni- tude of pattern learning. There were also age differences in what was learned, with only younger people revealing sensitivity to higher order statistical dependencies in the sequence. In addition, whereas younger people revealed evidence of their pattern learning in a subsequent conceptually driven production test, young-old and old-old people did not. Everyday experience demonstrates how remarkably sensitive people are to regularities in their environment. In some cases people are aware of these regularities and can describe them (e.g., the sequence of events required to start a car), but in many other cases they seem oblivious to them and find them difficult or impossible to describe even though there may be other evidence that the pattern is known (e.g., the syntactic rules of language). In the latter case, implicit learning is said to have occurred, and several theorists have proposed that such implicit learning is fundamentally different from explicit learning (e.g., Reber, 1993; Seger, 1994). For example, Schacter and Tulving (1994) have argued that implicit and explicit learning are based on neurologically distinct memory systems, and Reber and his colleagues (Reber, Allen, & Reber, in press) proposed that the implicit system is more basic than the explicit from both the developmental and evolutionary points of view. Implicit learning has been studied by using a variety of labo- ratory tasks. In each case, people are presented with material that contains some subtle regularity or structure, and the acquisi- tion of this knowledge is measured (see Reber et al., in press, for a review). Implicit learning is said to occur when participants

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