Procedural and declarative memory: a developmental study.

Measures of procedural and declarative memory were administered to 88 children forming two groups, aged 8 and 12. Two measures of priming, Gollin Figures and Degraded Words, were compared to declarative measures of recall. Strong support for a developmental dissociation between priming tasks and declarative memory was found. Both age groups showed a similar amount of priming facilitation, yet a significant age effect was observed for the declarative recall tasks. Current findings demonstrate that the level of procedural memory performance stabilizes during a period of development when declarative memory continues to improve.