Mediated Priming in Younger and Older Adults

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.