Adults’ perceptions of forgetful children: the impact of child age, domain, and memory type

Abstract

Prospective memory (PM) tasks have been described as social in nature because carrying out one's intentions often has an impact on others. Despite the claim that PM errors (compared to retrospective memory [RM] errors) are perceived as character flaws, little empirical work has tested this assertion. In particular, no study has examined how adults perceive children's PM errors. Thus, the aim of the current studies was to examine adults' perceptions of children's forgetfulness depending on child age (4 vs. 10-year-olds), domain of the memory error (academic vs. social), and memory type (PM vs. RM). In Study 1, adult participants rated children's PM errors on seven traits. Findings showed that social errors were rated more negatively than academic errors, and age and domain interacted such that 10-year-olds were rated more negatively than 4-year-olds for making social errors but not academic errors. Study 2 examined the impact of child age, domain, and memory type on perceptions of forgetful children to specifically test differences between PM and RM errors. Results showed a larger difference between ratings of 10-year-olds for their academic and social memory errors compared to 4year-olds, but only for RM errors.

“Teacher, forgive me, I forgot to do it!” The impact of children's prospective memory on teachers' evaluation of academic performance

“…On the one hand, this finding could confirm Munsat's claim (1965), according to which people with bad PM would be negatively perceived by others, might also occur in school. Similarly, a recent study showed that adults tend to judge children, especially older children, with bad PM as having a flawed personality (Moeller et al, 2021). On the other hand, the influence of PM over grades could have been mediated by other cognitive skills, which may contribute to both PM and academic performance.…”

“…Contrary to the hypotheses, teachers' evaluations of children's social skills were not affected by their PM performance. Based on Munsat ( 1965 ) and on the recently published study by Moeller et al ( 2021 ), it was expected that children with low PM performance would also be evaluated as being less socially skilled than participants with higher PM ability. However, our model did not reveal a significant relation between PM performance and social skills evaluations.…”

“…Consequently, it would be more likely that PM failures negatively affect the perceptions of a person's social competence. In this vein, Moeller et al ( 2021 ) recently explored how forgetful children are perceived by adults. In two experiments, the authors showed different vignettes to adult participants, depicting children of different ages (4‐year and 10‐year‐old children) who forget to complete intentions in different situations (academic or social).…”

From the lab to the classroom: Improving children's prospective memory in a natural setting

“…In fact, PM develops considerably during childhood, typically reaching its peak only in late adolescence or young adulthood (Zimmermann & Meier, 2006). Considering the negative consequences that frequent forgetting of intentions can have on children's academic success, social relationships, health, and well-being (e.g., Basso et al, 2023;Moeller et al, 2021), researchers have recognized the necessity to investigate ways to support children's PM performance (see Cottini, 2023, for a review of the literature). For instance, recent studies have shown that prompting children to imagine performing the PM task beforehand, namely, giving episodic future thinking (EFT) instructions or asking them to predict their PM performance (i.e., metacognitive monitoring), can improve children's PM performance (Cottini et al, 2018;Kretschmer-Trendowicz et al, 2016.…”

Improving children’s ability to remember intentions: a literature review on strategies to improve prospective memory during childhood

“…The ability to remember and execute intended actions, defined as prospective memory (PM; Einstein & McDaniel, 1990 ), does not fully develop until late adolescence or young adulthood and children often rely on adults’ support (Kretschmer-Trendowicz & Altgassen, 2016 ; Zimmermann & Meier, 2006 ). Notwithstanding, at the start of primary school, children are gradually expected to remember intentions independently (Hajdas et al, 2021 ) and are often judged negatively by adults when they fail to do so (Moeller et al, 2021 ). School-aged children who frequently fail to remember are likely to be disadvantaged in various contexts of their life: in school, when they forget to do their homework or to complete assignments; in their relationships, when they forget to return a toy to a friend or to convey messages to their parents, and regarding their health and well-being, when they forget to wear a helmet when bike riding or to take the lunchbox to school (Mahy et al, 2014 ).…”