Age effects in emotional prospective memory: Cue valence differentially affects the prospective and retrospective component. (original) (raw)
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Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition, 2007
Two experiments examined the puzzling variation in the age-related patterns for eventbased prospective memory tasks. Both experiments involved a famous faces ongoing task with a feature of the famous face as the target for the prospective memory task. In Experiment 1, a substantial age deficit was found on the prospective memory task when the cue was nonfocal (wearing glasses) to the ongoing task, replicating previous research, but this deficit was significantly reduced with a focal cue (first name John). In Experiment 2, the prospective memory cue (wearing glasses) was held constant and the demands of the ongoing task of naming faces were varied. The substantial age differences found with a nonfocal cue were eliminated when the ongoing task was made less challenging. The findings help reconcile the divergent age-related findings reported in the literature.
Aging and Prospective Memory: Differences Between Naturalistic and Laboratory Tasks
The Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, 1999
The contrasting age-related trends on laboratory and naturalistic prospective memory (PM) studies were investigated with the same participants. In the first two experiments, 380 participants in three age groups (20s, 60s and 80+) were given a naturalistic PM task of logging the time at four set times for one week. There were six between-subjects regimens that varied the complexity of the time schedule, and the opportunity to use conjunction cues and external aids. The 60s and 80+ age groups did not differ and both older adult age groups were consistently superior to the young adults on all regimens. In Experiment3, the same participants showed a significant age-related decline on retrospective memory tasks, and on eventbased and time-based laboratory PM tasks embedded within the retrospective memory tasks. The study confirmed the paradoxical age-related trends on laboratory and naturalistic PM tasks. P256 by guest on October 31, 2016 http://psychsocgerontology.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from by guest on October 31, 2016 http://psychsocgerontology.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from 13.75 7.50 78.75 by guest on October 31, 2016 http://psychsocgerontology.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from
Journal of Psychology & Psychotherapy, 2013
Smith posited that successful prospective retrieval requires the intervention of resource-demanding attentional monitoring processes. According to this perspective, the ongoing task and the PM task would be competing for limited resources, and therefore the deficits associated with aging in PM should generally appear given that older adults will presumably try to maintain performance of the ongoing task to a reasonable extent, and thus their prospective remembering will be compromised . This is how the absence of age-related PM deficits can be explained: by adducing that participants try to maintain
Normal aging and prospective memory
1990
We develop a laboratory paradigm for studying prospective memory and examine whether or not this type of memory is especially difficult for the elderly. In two experiments, young and old subjects were given a prospective memory test (they were asked to perform an action when a target event occurred) and three tests of retrospective memory (short-term memory, free recall, and recognition). From the perspective that aging disrupts mainly self-initiated retrieval processes, large age-related decrements in prospective memory were anticipated. However, despite showing reliable age differences on retrospective memory tests, both experiments showed no age deficits in prospective memory. Moreover, regression analyses produced no reliable relation between the prospective and retrospective memory tasks. Also, the experiments showed that external aids and unfamiliar target events benefit prospective memory performance. These results suggest some basic differences between prospective and retrospective memory.
Prospective memory and ageing: Is task importance relevant?
International Journal of Psychology, 2003
Memory for activities to be performed in the future, i.e., prospective memory, such as remembering to take medication or remembering to give a colleague a message, is a pervasive real world memory task that has recently begun to attract the attention of numerous researchers. Age effects in prospective memory have been found particularly in complex paradigms requiring participants to remember to switch between several sub-tasks in a limited time period (e.g., . Here, most of the older adults tend to try to complete one or two subtasks and to forget the prospective instruction to work on all sub-tasks. Since recent findings in this context show that one profits from tips regarding the relevant task's salience in complex double-tasks, it seems likely that age effects in prospective memory tasks might also be due to the lack of information about the salience of the prospective task. To test this hypothesis, the salience of the prospective task was varied in the present study with 104 young and old participants by providing motivational incentives to interrupt and switch during the introduction phase (plan formation) as well as during the execution phase. Also, interindividual differences regarding non-executive as well as executive cognitive resources were analyzed, thus allowing estimation of the relationship between these factors and (age-related) performance in complex prospective remembering.
Effect of age on event-based and time-based prospective memory
Psychology and Aging, 1997
The magnitude of age differences on event-and time-based prospective memory tasks was investigated in 2 experiments. Participants performed a working memory task and were also required to perform either an event-or time-based prospective action. Control participants performed either the working memory task only or the prospective memory task only. Results yielded age differences on both prospective tasks. The age effect was particularly marked on the time-based task. Performance of the event-based prospective task, however, had a higher cost to performance on the concurrent working memory task than the time-based task did, suggesting that event-based responding has a substantial attentional requirement. The older adults also made a significant number of time-monitoring errors when time monitoring was their sole task. This suggests that some time-based prospective memory deficits in older adults are due to a fundamental deficit in time monitoring rather than to prospective memory.
Psychology and Aging, 2013
The present meta-analysis investigated whether event-based prospective memory (PM) age effects differ by task order specificity. In specified PM tasks, the order of the ongoing and the PM task response is predetermined, which imposes demands on cognitive control to navigate the possible response options. In contrast, unspecified PM tasks do not require responding in a particular order. Based on 57 studies and more than 5,500 younger and older adults, results showed larger PM age effects in specified compared with unspecified PM tasks. Additionally, the effect of task focality on age differences was replicated. Results suggest that both pre-and postretrieval processes independently affect PM age effects.
The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2010
Previous research has identified "the age-prospective memory paradox"-that adult ageing results in reliably poorer performance on laboratory-based tasks of prospective memory (PM), but improved performance on such tasks carried out in real-life settings. We hypothesized that even in their everyday environment, older adults might be worse at PM tasks that are triggered during an experimenter-generated ongoing activity. The present study used a task that captured the key features of the classic laboratory paradigm, but which was completed in a setting that met key criteria to be considered naturalistic. In their everyday setting, participants' PM was assessed, with the cue to remember occurring either (a) during their day-to-day activities, or (b) during an experimenter-generated ongoing task. The results confirmed previous naturalistic findings, in showing that older adults (n ¼ 28) exhibited better PM than their younger counterparts (n ¼ 65) when prompted during their everyday activities. However, older adults were also then subsequently less likely to show effective PM during experimenter-generated ongoing activity. Reproducing the paradox within a single dataset, these data indicate that older adults can effectively act on intentions during everyday activities, but have difficulty in prospective remembering during experimenter-generated ongoing tasks.
Psychology and Aging, 2008
Studies of age differences in event-based prospective memory indicate wide variation in the magnitude of age effects. One explanation derived from the multiprocess framework proposes that age differences depend on whether the cue to carry out a prospective intention is focal to ongoing task processing. A meta-analysis of 117 effect sizes from 4,709 participants provided evidence for this view, as age effects were greater when the prospective cue to the ongoing task was nonfocal compared with when it was focal. However, the results only support a weaker but not a stronger prediction of the multiprocess framework, as age impairments were reliably above zero for both types of retrieval cues.