Developmental Trends in Implicit and Explicit Memory: A Picture Completion Study

The presence of a developmental trend in the magnitude of perceptual repetition priming was assessed in two experiments using picture completion. Preschool children, 6-year-old children, and young adults showed the same amount of repetition priming when both a proportional measure of priming (Snodgrass, 1989) was used and spurious explicit memory influences were partialled out from the implicit task. This finding was contrasted with the age-associated improvement in explicit memory as measured by cued and free recall. These results highlight the relevance of controlling explicit memory influence on implicit memory tasks in determining the effect of a variable on implicit processes; moreover they provide further support for the distinction between implicit and explicit memory.