An Internet study of prospective memory across adulthood.

Logie, Robert H.; Maylor, Elizabeth A.

doi:10.1037/a0015479

Cited by 70 publications

(78 citation statements)

References 43 publications

(59 reference statements)

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“…Again, the older group performed more poorly than the younger group, but the age effect was smaller with the realistic simulation on the measure of our very recent studies, described briefly above, on prospective memory in the multitasking setting of the breakfast making simulation are in the process of being prepared for publication. However, the results on ageing are consistent with a separate, very large scale published study carried out via the internet in collaboration with the British Broadcasting Corporation (Logie & Maylor, 2009;Maylor & Logie, 2010). This involved 318,614 participants, aged 8-80 years who undertook a range of working memory tasks, within which were embedded a one-shot prospective memory and a one-shot retrospective memory test.…”

supporting

confidence: 70%

Multitasking, working memory and remembering intentions

et al. 2010

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We are grateful to Matthew Logie for undertaking the programming to create the EVET environment. We also are grateful to Fergus Craik for permission to use the Craik and Bialystock (2006) breakfast task in our research and to their programmer Perry Tohn for providing a copy of the programme and for help with its implementation in our laboratory. Multitasking refers to the performance of a range of tasks that have to be completed within a limited time period. it differs from dual task paradigms in that tasks are performed not in parallel, but by interleaving, switching from one to the other. it differs also from task switching paradigms in that the time scale is very much longer, multiple different tasks are involved, and most tasks have a clear end point. Multitasking has been studied extensively with particular sets of experts such as in aviation and in the military, and impairments of multitasking performance have been studied in patients with frontal lobe lesions. Much less is known as to how multitasking is achieved in healthy adults who have not had specific training in the necessary skills. This paper will provide a brief review of research on everyday multitasking, and summarise the results of some recent experiments on simulated everyday tasks chosen to require advance and on-line planning, retrospective memory, prospective memory, and visual, spatial and verbal short-term memory.The adult human mind is remarkably adept at selecting and implementing a wide range of mental functions for multiple interactions with the world. These interactions may be planned or spontaneous, but are constrained by physical and mental capacities or by time and the physical environment, often requiring multiple tasks or multi-part tasks. Successful implementation requires the efficient ordering or interleaving of tasks, and occasionally performing tasks in parallel. every-day examples are cooking a meal, a timelimited shopping trip, or completing a range of different office based tasks. Despite its ubiquitous everyday requirement, there is limited insight into how everyday multitasking is achieved by healthy adults and how performance might be constrained or enhanced. Key to multitasking success is the ability to draw on a wide range of cognitive functions acting in concert to achieve multiple goals or multi-layered goals. These widely varying and frequent demands on the whole cognitive system are in contrast to the majority of research on human cognition that tends to focus on individual cognitive functions in relative isolation, such as perception, attention, prospective memory, semantic and episodic memory or working memory.

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confidence: 70%

Multitasking, working memory and remembering intentions

et al. 2010

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“…This finding is in sharp contrast with negative age effects in the laboratory colour paper and red pen tasks, and suggests that the prospective memory and ageing paradox may not necessarily be about the context of enquiry (lab vs. real life) but rather about types of tasks participants have to carry out. Of key importance may be whether the ongoing tasks are experimenter controlled or not (e.g., see Bailey et al, 2010;Logie & Maylor, 2009). Indeed, in the red pen and the colour paper task, participants were engaged in carrying out various experimenter controlled cognitive tasks when they encountered the target events (even though the ongoing tasks were self-paced, cf.…”

Section: This Pattern Of Findings Fully Replicates the Results Of Niementioning

confidence: 99%

Prospective memory and ageing paradox with event-based tasks: A study of young, young-old, and old-old participants

Kvavilashvili

Cockburn

Kornbrot

2013

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

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Research on ageing and prospective memory—remembering to do something in the future—has resulted in paradoxical findings, whereby older adults are often impaired in the laboratory but perform significantly better than younger adults in naturalistic settings. Nevertheless, there are very few studies that have examined prospective memory both in and outside the laboratory using the same sample of young and old participants. Moreover, most naturalistic studies have used time-based tasks, and it is unclear whether the prospective memory and ageing paradox extends to event-based tasks. In this study, 72 young (18–30 years), 79 young-old (61–70 years), and 72 old-old (71–80 years) participants completed several event-based tasks in and outside the laboratory. Results showed that the ageing paradox does exist for event-based tasks but manifests itself differently from that in time-based tasks. Thus, younger adults outperformed old-old participants in two laboratory event-based tasks, but there were no age effects for a naturalistic task completed at home (remembering to write the date and time in the upper left corner of a questionnaire). The young and old-old also did not differ in remembering to retrieve a wristwatch from a pocket at the end of the laboratory session. This indicates that the paradox may be due to differences in ongoing task demands in the lab and everyday life, rather than the location per se. The findings call for a concentrated effort towards a theory of cognitive ageing that identifies the variables that do, or do not, account for this paradox.

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“…In contrast, tests of nonverbal reasoning tend to show faster declines with age that begin around age 30, and tests of perceptual speed show even sharper declines beginning as early as age 20. (Hunt, 1949;Jones & Conrad, 1933;Logie & Maylor, 2009;Lovden, Ghisletta, & Lindenberger, 2004;Salthouse, 2009;Schaie, 1994). In all cases, however, longitudinal data show less extreme differences with age than do crosssectional data.…”

mentioning

confidence: 88%

“…Whether cross-sectional or longitudinal, the age differences are thought by many to reflect cognitive aging processes, with the differences in rates of change with age reflecting differences between the aging processes underlying tests that measure primarily current efficiency of various kinds of information processing and memory and other tests that measure cumulative products of processing carried out in the past (Salthouse, 2006). To some, these differences suggest the presence of relatively modular cognitive capacities that change with age at different rates regardless of a common factor such as general working memory capacity (e.g., Logie, Della Sala, MacPherson, & Cooper, 2007;Logie & Maylor, 2009;Park et al, 2002;Perfect & Maylor, 2000). Others, however, see changes in g as the main drivers of cognitive aging (e.g., Gow et al, 2008;McGue & Christensen, 2002;Rabbitt, Lunn, Wong, & Cobain, 2008).…”

mentioning

confidence: 98%

Working memory tasks differ in factor structure across age cohorts: Implications for dedifferentiation

2010

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Researchers interested in working memory have debated whether it should be considered a single latent cognitive ability or a set of essentially independent latent abilities distinguished by domain-specific memory and/or processing resources. Simultaneously, researchers interested in cognitive aging have established that there are substantial differences in rates of change in various aspects of cognitive function with age. In general, so-called fluid measures of cognitive function including working memory decline at faster rates in later adulthood than so-called crystallized measures. Using an Internet working and short-term memory test battery completed by over 95,000 people aged 18-90, we used multiple-group confirmatory factor analysis to assess the extent to which working memory could be considered a single latent ability as well as how its common and unique variance components varied with age. Results indicated a single latent factor, but the tests did not reflect this factor consistently across age groups. Both individual test residual variances and factor intercepts showed different patterns of variation with age. We discuss the implications for understanding age differences in working memory function.

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An Internet study of prospective memory across adulthood.

Cited by 70 publications

References 43 publications

Multitasking, working memory and remembering intentions

Multitasking, working memory and remembering intentions

Prospective memory and ageing paradox with event-based tasks: A study of young, young-old, and old-old participants

Working memory tasks differ in factor structure across age cohorts: Implications for dedifferentiation

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