Repetition priming and recognition memory in younger and older persons: temporal stability and performance.

The dissociation between intact priming and reduced explicit memory in aging has been called into question on the basis of limited information that suggests that priming measures are less reliable than explicit memory measures. No aging study to date, however, has offered a comprehensive examination of the reliability of these measures. Age-related performance and test-retest stability coefficients for multiple priming and explicit memory tasks were compared. Age effects were found on some tasks but not others, and stability was not related to task performance. Stability was similar for implicit versus explicit task instructions, younger versus older persons, and studied versus unstudied items. Results indicate that dissociations between priming and explicit memory performances cannot be accounted for by differential reliability of the measures.