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Background/Study Context: The study directly compared the learning performance of younger and older participants in two situations, one in which they had the possibility of detecting functional relations in the learning setting, and one in which they did not. Functional relations were defined as functional correspondences that could be established between abstract properties extracted from the sets of stimulus items and an abstract property extracted from the set of response items.

Methods: A total of 112 adults (18–90 years old) had to learn to predict the values of a numerical variable (the criterion) on the basis of two words (a plant and an animal) as cues. Five plants and five animals were graded according to size. The plant × animal design was orthogonal. The values of the criterion were obtained using an additive, linear scheme under the functional relations condition, and using random associations under the …