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Abstract of Research Interests
Everyday experience demonstrates how remarkably sensitive people are to regularities in their environment. In many cases people learn about these regularities unintentionally and without awareness that learning has occurred. Recent research has shown that learning of this sort, or implicit learning, operates under different principles than more explicit, conscious, declarative forms of learning, and is based upon different neural substrates. Our research investigates age-related differences and similarities in the implicit learning of structural regularities in the environment. Although our early research demonstrated that implicit learning is relatively preserved in aging, our more recent studies have shown that age-related deficits occur when subtle regularities are used. On-going work investigates the specific cognitive and neural mechanisms that underlie these deficits.
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