Fifty 7-year-olds (29 female), 53 10-year-olds (29 female), and 36 young adults (19 female), performed a computerized event-based prospective memory task. All three groups differed significantly in prospective memory performance with adults showing the best performance and 7-year-olds the poorest performance. We used a formal multinomial process tree model of eventbased prospective memory to decompose age differences in cognitive processes that jointly contribute to prospective memory performance. The formal modeling results demonstrated that adults differed significantly from the 7-year-olds and 10-year-olds on both the prospective component and the retrospective component of the task. The 7-year-olds and 10-year-olds differed only in the ability to recognize prospective memory target events. The prospective memory task imposed a cost to ongoing activities in all three age groups. Keywords children; prospective memory; multinomial model; formal model Prospective memory, which is remembering to perform an action in the future, is a fundamental function of memory in our daily lives as adults, but children must also begin to remember on their own: remember to ask your mother about the field trip, remember to bring something for show and tell, remember an appointment with a friend. A child who does not develop the ability to successfully perform prospective memory tasks is likely to have difficulty interacting well with parents, teachers, and peers (McCauley & Levine, 2004;Meacham, 1982). The current study compares prospective memory in 7-year-olds, 10-yearolds, and young adults. This study is the first to apply a multinomial process tree model (Smith & Bayen, 2004) to decompose age differences in the cognitive processes that jointly Correspondence should be addressed to Rebekah E. Smith, UTSA Department of Psychology, One UTSA Circle, San Antonio, TX, 78249, rebekah.smith@utsa.edu. Publisher's Disclaimer: The following manuscript is the final accepted manuscript. It has not been subjected to the final copyediting, fact-checking, and proofreading required for formal publication. It is not the definitive, publisher-authenticated version. The American Psychological Association and its Council of Editors disclaim any responsibility or liabilities for errors or omissions of this manuscript version, any version derived from this manuscript by NIH, or other third parties. The published version is available at www.apa.org/pubs/journals/xlm. NIH Public Access Author ManuscriptDev Psychol. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2010 April 19. NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript contribute to age differences in prospective-memory performance from childhood to young adulthood. Prospective Memory in ChildrenFor the most part, existing studies show improvement in prospective memory performance during the elementary school years (e.g., Kerns, 2000;Martin & Kliegel, 2003;Maylor, Darby, Logie, Della Sala, & Smith, 2002;Meacham & Dumitru, 1976;Passolunghi, Brandimonte, & Cornoldi, 1995; s...

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In hindsight, that is, after receiving the correct answers to difficult questions, people's recall of their own prior answers tends to be biased toward the correct answers. We tested 139 participants from 3 age groups (9- and 12-year-olds and adults) in a hindsight-bias paradigm and found that all groups showed hindsight bias. Multinomial model-based analyses indicated that all age groups used the correct answers to reconstruct their original answers. In addition, the youngest group showed memory impairment caused by the presentation of the correct answers as well as an increased belief that they knew the correct answers all along. These results support a multiprocess explanation of hindsight bias in children.

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This article is part of the Thematic Series "Materials for sustainable energy production, storage, and conversion".