Direct and indirect measures of memory for modality in young and older adults

In 2 experiments, young and older adults demonstrated modality effects of similar magnitude in perceptual identification tasks. That is, both young and older adults demonstrated more repetition priming when study and test modalities matched than when they were different, suggesting that contextual information was equally available across age. However, when asked explicitly to retrieve modality information, older adults were less accurate than young adults. These results constitute evidence for a dissociation between direct and indirect measures of memory for modality information. They call into question hypotheses that memory impairment in old age is due to deficient encoding of contextual information and challenge current accounts of modality effects in repetition priming.