Abstract
Despite extensive declines in various explicit memory processes, priming, a form of implicit memory, may be spared in cognitive aging. However, the nature of age-related neural changes in priming tasks utilizing repetitions of perceptually similar objects, which are different exemplars of the same item, is only beginning to be understood. In the present neuroimaging study, we evaluated behavioral and neural priming for multiple presentations of similar visual objects in 18 young adults and 17 older adults. Consistent with prior work, we found comparable behavioral performance across age groups in a similar object priming task, and further observed similar patterns of engagement across age groups in the left fusiform, demonstrating that this region has a role in priming specificity for older adults. Age differences were however observed in other perceptual regions involved in priming such as parahippocampal areas and anterior portions of the left middle occipital gyrus, as well as in bilateral interior frontal areas and left middle temporal areas involved in the semantic/conceptual components of repetition priming. No systematic age differences based on the number of repetitions were discovered in either behavioral or neural measures. These results suggest that in similar visual object priming tasks, older adults might maintain behavioral performance by relying on the utilization of compensatory neural processes, yet may also depend on the engagement of the same neural networks (i.e. left fusiform) utilized in young adults for priming specificity.