Age‐related differences in everyday prospective memory tasks: The role of planning and personal importance

The aim of the present studies was to investigate whether age‐related improvement found in naturalistic but experimenter‐given prospective memory (PM) tasks can be generalized to real‐life intentions. In Study 1, younger, middle‐aged, and older adults generated a list of intended activities for the following week; one week later they marked the tasks that they had performed. The participants were also asked to rate the importance of each listed intention and to describe the circumstances of completion that were already known to them. We found that, compared with younger adults, older adults attributed a higher degree of importance to their intentions and had the circumstances of their completion better planned. However, the age‐related benefit in the PM performance for all listed intentions was not present for the very important and well‐planned tasks. In Study 2 we manipulated whether younger adults engaged or not in the detailed planning of when their intentions could be completed. It was demonstrated that younger adults who had to perform detailed planning completed their intended activities more often than those who did not plan for their intentions. The results support explanations of the age‐related benefit in everyday PM that highlight the role of importance and planning.     

Varying the importance of a prospective memory task: differential effects across time- and event-based prospective memory

Only few studies have addressed the issue of task importance in prospective memory. Most of them, but not all, have shown that perceived task importance does improve prospective memory performance. However, there is little understanding of (1) the conditions under which importance of the prospective memory task makes a difference in performance and (2) the mechanisms by which perceived task importance has an effect on prospective memory performance. The present study reports two experiments that manipulate task importance in a time-based and an event-based prospective memory paradigm. Results show that importance has an effect on the time-based but not on the event-based task. Further analyses of the performance in the cover tasks as well as the monitoring behaviour indicate that importance improves prospective memory to the degree the task requires the strategic allocation of attentional resources.     

Age and individual differences influence prospective memory

The influence of age and individual ability differences on event-based prospective memory was examined using an adapted version of G. O. Einstein and M. A. McDaniel's (1990) task. Two samples of younger and older adults who differed in educational attainment, occupational status, and verbal ability were compared. Results yield comparable prospective performance for the younger groups and higher ability older adults; lower ability older adults performed more poorly by comparison. Hierarchical regression analyses indicated that working memory span and recognition accounted for small but significant proportions of variance in prospective performance. The contribution of ability level to prospective memory remained significant even after statistically controlling for self-reported health and social activity characteristics. Implications for current views on prospective memory aging are discussed.     

Age differences in prospective memory for everyday life intentions: A diary approach

The age benefit found in many naturalistic prospective memory (PM) tasks has been taken as evidence that PM performance in real life may be spared from aging. However, this conclusion lacks empirical confirmation. Hence, the aim of the present study was to examine possible age differences in the content of everyday PM intentions and their performance. Everyday PM was assessed in young and older adults using a diary approach. Results confirmed a general age benefit for real-life PM tasks. Importantly, this finding was qualified by revealing that the benefit only held true for specific types of intentions such as health and social intentions. Further, moderation analyses showed that the relationships between cognitive functioning and everyday PM were different for young and older adults. While better inhibition, short-term and long-term memory were related with successful PM performance in the young, this was not the case in the older adults. The present findings suggest that the age benefit found in naturalistic experimenter-given tasks extends to real-life PM performance, but may differ depending on the type of intention. Furthermore, cognitive functioning predicts performance in the young, but not in the older adults.     

Age-related deficits in prospective memory: the influence of task complexity.

Younger and older subjects were asked to perform an action whenever target words occurred during a short-term memory task. The difficulty of this prospective memory task was manipulated by varying the delay preceding the occurrence of a target event and by varying the number of different target events. Age-related performance differences emerged when there were several different target events but not when there was one target event presented several times. Age-related performance differences, when they occurred, were associated with poorer retrospective memory for the target events. The results were interpreted in terms of a componential analysis of prospective memory, which assumes both similarities and differences between prospective and retrospective memory.     

Social importance enhances prospective memory: evidence from an event-based task

Prospective memory performance can be enhanced by task importance, for example by promising a reward. Typically, this comes at costs in the ongoing task. However, previous research has suggested that social importance (e.g., providing a social motive) can enhance prospective memory performance without additional monitoring costs in activity-based and time-based tasks. The aim of the present study was to investigate the influence of social importance in an event-based task. We compared four conditions: social importance, promising a reward, both social importance and promising a reward, and standard prospective memory instructions (control condition). The results showed enhanced prospective memory performance for all importance conditions compared to the control condition. Although ongoing task performance was slowed in all conditions with a prospective memory task when compared to a baseline condition with no prospective memory task, additional costs occurred only when both the social importance and reward were present simultaneously. Alone, neither social importance nor promising a reward produced an additional slowing when compared to the cost in the standard (control) condition. Thus, social importance and reward can enhance event-based prospective memory at no additional cost.     

Awareness of memory task impairment versus everyday memory difficulties in dementia

The study investigated different types of awareness of memory dysfunction in dementia, specifically judgements concerning memory task performance or appraisal of everyday memory functioning and also exploring the neuropsychological correlates of such awareness. This was investigated in 76 people with dementia, comprising 46 patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and 30 patients with vascular dementia (VaD). The Memory Awareness Rating Scale (Clare et al., 2002, Neuropsychol Rehabil, 12, 341–362) was used, which includes an Objective‐Judgement Discrepancy (OJD) technique involving comparison of subjective evaluation of performance on specific memory tasks with actual performance, and a Subjective Rating Discrepancy (SRD) technique, which compares self versus informant judgement of everyday memory function. The AD and VaD groups showed lower awareness than a normal control group for both types of measures, the AD group showing less awareness than the VaD group on the OJD measure. Regression analyses supported associations for both groups between memory impairment and the OJD measure and between naming impairment and the SRD measure. The findings are discussed in terms of neurocognitive theories accounting for loss of awareness in dementia.     

Age,working memory,and the Tower of London task

The current study explores the role of three components of working memory in age differences in an executive task, the Tower of London (TOL). The TOL task is sensitive to frontal lobe damage, and is widely used to measure planning ability. Dual tasks were used to test the involvement of the phonological loop (articulatory suppression), visuospatial buffer (pattern tapping), and central executive (random generation) in age effects on the TOL. Older adults showed greater reliance than young on domain-specific verbal and spatial memory components in performing the TOL. In terms of executive function, qualitatively different interference patterns were seen in young and old participants. However, the validity of using random generation tasks to assess executive function in older populations can be questioned. For older participants, performing the TOL loads all components of working memory, whereas for the younger participants the TOL more specifically loads executive functioning.     

The cultural grounding of personal relationship: the importance of attractiveness in everyday life

Previous research has suggested that physically attractive people experience more positive life outcomes than do unattractive people. However, the importance of physical attractiveness in everyday life may vary depending on the extent to which different cultural worlds afford or require individual choice in the construction and maintenance of personal relationships. The authors hypothesized that attractiveness matters more for life outcomes in settings that promote voluntaristic-independent constructions of relationship as the product of personal choice than it does in settings that promote embedded-interdependent constructions of relationship as an environmental affordance. Study 1 examined self-reported outcomes of attractive and unattractive persons. Study 2 examined expectations about attractive and unattractive targets. Results provide support for the hypothesis along four dimensions: national context, relationship context, rural-urban context, and experimental manipulation of relationship constructions. These patterns suggest that the importance of physical attractiveness documented by psychological research is the product of particular constructions of reality.     

Effects of delay of prospective memory cues in an ongoing task on prospective memory task performance

To address the mixed results reported in previous studies, the present experiments examined forgetting in prospective memory (PM) by manipulating the delay between the PM instructions and cue presentation in event-based PM tasks. PM performance was measured for delays of 2–20 min in Experiment 1 and for delays of approximately 1–10 min in Experiment 2. Experiment 2 included both focal and nonfocal PM tasks, and speed on the ongoing task was measured to examine evidence for monitoring processes across the delays tested. The results suggest that nonfocal PM performance follows a nonlinear forgetting function (i.e., rapid decline for shorter delays and slower decline for longer delays) when tested over delays from 1 to 20 min. No effect of delay was seen for the focal task tested in Experiment 2 from 1 to 10 min. In Experiment 2, ongoing-task costs were also found for the first delay but not for longer delays, suggesting that monitoring was significantly reduced between 1 and 2.5 min of the ongoing-task trials.     

Effects of ongoing task context and target typicality on prospective memory performance: the importance of associative cueing

Two experiments examined whether prospective memory performance is influenced by contextual cues. In our automatic activation model, any information available at encoding and retrieval should aid recall of the prospective task. The first experiment demonstrated an effect of the ongoing task context; performance was better when information about the ongoing task present at retrieval was available at encoding. Performance was also improved by a strong association between the prospective memory target as it was presented at retrieval and the intention as it was encoded. Experiment 2 demonstrated boundary conditions of the ongoing task context effect, which implicate the association between the ongoing and prospective tasks formed at encoding as the source of the context effect. The results of this study are consistent with predictions based on automatic activation of intentions.     

The role of metacognition in prospective memory: Anticipated task demands influence attention allocation strategies

The present study investigates how individuals distribute their attentional resources between a prospective memory task and an ongoing task. Therefore, metacognitive expectations about the attentional demands of the prospective-memory task were manipulated while the factual demands were held constant. In Experiments 1a and 1b, we found attentional costs from a prospective-memory task with low factual demands to be significantly reduced when information about the low to-be-expected demands were provided, while prospective-memory performance remained largely unaffected. In Experiment 2, attentional monitoring in a more demanding prospective-memory task also varied with information about the to-be-expected demands (high vs. low) and again there were no equivalent changes in prospective-memory performance. These findings suggest that attention–allocation strategies of prospective memory rely on metacognitive expectations about prospective-memory task demands. Furthermore, the results suggest that attentional monitoring is only functional for prospective memory to the extent to which anticipated task demands reflect objective task demands.     

Age differences in everyday memory: laboratory analogues of telephone number recall

Three experiments were conducted to examine age differences in memory for telephone numbers by adults ranging from 18 to 85 years of age. In the first 2 studies, using visual simultaneous presentation, age declines in immediate recall were evident on 10-digit numbers, but not on 3-digit numbers. With 7-digit numbers, the youngest group performed significantly better than the oldest (70-85 years) group. In the second study, more marked age declines occurred when subjects had to redial a number after a busy signal. The third experiment replicated the observed aging pattern with auditory sequential presentation. Also, chunked presentation of local telephone numbers resulted in high performance for old and young in sequential recall. The findings were discussed in relation to task processing demands and practical issues related to telephone number recall.     

Effects of ongoing task context and target typicality on prospective memory performance: The importance of associative cueing

Two experiments examined whether prospective memory performance is influenced by contextual cues. In our automatic activation model, any information available at encoding and retrieval should aid recall of the prospective task. The first experiment demonstrated an effect of the ongoing task context; performance was better when information about the ongoing task present at retrieval was available at encoding. Performance was also improved by a strong association between the prospective memory target as it was presented at retrieval and the intention as it was encoded. Experiment 2 demonstrated boundary conditions of the ongoing task context effect, which implicate the association between the ongoing and prospective tasks formed at encoding as the source of the context effect. The results of this study are consistent with predictions based on automatic activation of intentions.     

Prospective memory and aging: The effects of working memory and prospective memory task load

Abstract

A person's level of engagement in other actions may influence whether a prospective action is correctly performed. This study used a computerized prospective memory task in which participants remembered to perform an action when a specified background pattern appeared while they simultaneously performed a verbal working memory task. Amount of engagement in the working memory task was manipulated by increasing the number of words to be recalled. Prospective memory load was manipulated by varying the number of prospective targets. Older adults performed more poorly than younger adults on the prospective memory task under higher working memory load and also higher prospective load. Participants with lower working memory load performed better on the prospective task, regardless of age. There were no significant age differences in the absolute accuracy of performance postdictions (post experiment performance awareness). Age differences were also found with a second prospective memory task in which participants were told to write the day of the week (DOW) on the top of answer sheets for tasks performed later in the experiment. No significant correlations were observed between the two prospective memory tasks for either age group.     

Age and task effects in short-term memory of children

Children of 4, 8, and 14 years performed a visual memory task with easy- or hard-to-label displays and with or without repetition of stimuli over trials. Eight pictures were displayed in serial order, and the task was to find the card in the array that matched an identical probe card. Performance improved with age, and strong serial position effects were obtained for all ages and tasks. In contrast to previous studies, primacy effects were obtained for the youngest children tested. Task difficulty increased with difficulty of labeling and with repetition, but order of task difficulty remained the same for all ages. The d’ measure, borrowed from signal detection theory, revealed differences in criterion levels over serial position, which in earlier studies had been confounded with strength of memory.     

Video reminders in a representational change task: memory for cues but not beliefs or statements

Two experiments investigated the effect of video reminders on 3-year-olds' performance in a representational change task. In Experiment 1, children in a video support condition viewed videotapes of their initial incorrect statements about a misleading container prior to being asked to report their initial belief. Children in a control condition viewed an irrelevant videotape. Despite reporting what they had said on the videotape, children in the video support condition typically failed the representational change task. Experiment 2 replicated the main findings from Experiment 1 and also revealed that a video reminder failed to increase the likelihood that children would correctly report what they had said about the object. Results are discussed in terms of the processes whereby mnemonic cues might affect performance on tasks assessing theory of mind.     

Age and individual differences in working memory: the size judgment span task

The authors introduced the Size Judgment Span (SJS) task, a working memory measure developed for use with persons of varied educational backgrounds and general intellectual ability. The authors pooled data from 5 published articles where the SJS task and other measures of cognitive performance were administered to create an archival data set with 496 participants. Analyses of these data yielded strong evidence of age and individual ability differences in SJS performance, confirming the sensitivity of this task for empirically distinguishing age and ability groups. The SJS was also significantly correlated with the backward digit span and listening span tasks. Using hierarchical regression analyses, the authors examined the SJS task as a predictor of different forms of episodic memory, including spatial location memory, verbal free recall, and recognition memory. Results confirmed the practical utility and predictive validity of the SJS task. The authors considered implications for current theoretical views of working memory.     

The effects of age and cue-action reminders on event-based prospective memory performance in preschoolers

The present study investigated event-based prospective memory in five age groups of preschoolers (i.e., 2-, 3-, 4-, 5-, and 6-year-olds). Applying a laboratory-controlled prospective memory procedure, the data showed that event-based prospective memory performance improves across the preschool years, at least between 3 and 6 years of age. However, our findings do not confirm early speculations that 2-year-olds may have attained reliable skills to carry out future intentions on their own. By contrast, there were first signs of prospective memory abilities among the 3-year-olds. The present study also revealed that children as young as 3 years can use external memory aids in the form of cue-action reminders to improve their event-based prospective remembering. Finally, the findings suggest that parents or caregivers can adequately estimate their preschool children's prospective memory abilities, as revealed by applying a modified version of the Prospective and Retrospective Memory Questionnaire (PRMQ).     

Prospective memory in young and older adults: The effects of task importance and ongoing task load

Remembering to perform an action in the future, called prospective memory, often shows age-related differences in favor of young adults when tested in the laboratory. Recently Smith, Horn, and Bayen (2012; Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition, 19, 495) embedded a PM task in an ongoing color-matching task and manipulated the difficulty of the ongoing task by varying the number of colors on each trial of the task. Smith et al. found that age-related differences in PM performance (lower PM performance for older adults relative to young adults) persisted even when older adults could perform the ongoing task as well or better than the young adults. The current study investigates a possible explanation for the pattern of results reported by Smith et al. by including a manipulation of task emphasis: for half of the participants the prospective memory task was emphasize, while for the other half the ongoing color-matching task was emphasized. Older adults performed a 4-color version of the ongoing color-matching task, while young adults completed either the 4-color or a more difficult 6-color version of the ongoing task. Older adults failed to perform as well as the young adults on the prospective memory task regardless of task emphasis, even when older adults were performing as well or better than the young adults on the ongoing color-matching task. The current results indicate that the lack of an effect of ongoing task load on prospective memory task performance is not due to a perception that one or the other task is more important than the other.