Effect of age on event-based and time-based prospective memory.

Abstract

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. Recently there has been a great deal of interest in the study of prospective memory in younger and older adults (Brandimonte, Einstein, & McDaniel, 1996). Prospective memory refers to the memory required to carry out planned actions at the appropriate time, such as meeting a friend for lunch or taking a medication. Prospective memory involves retrieval of an intention to act that has been stored in long-term memory. An important element of prospective remembering is that one is typically engaged in a different kind of action or ongoing cognitive processing at the point in which prospective remembering is required (Park & Kidder, 1996; Park & Mayhorn, 1996). Prospective memory is important in maintaining function in everyday life, so it is of considerable interest as to whether this type of memory does decline in late adulthood. Although there is substantial evidence that both working memory and long-term memory decline with age (Craik & Jennings, 1992; Park et al., 1996), somewhat less is known about the relationship between aging and prospective memory. Naturalistic research on prospective memory that requires old and young adults to make phone calls or mail postcards at appointed times has yielded mixed evidence, with some studies reporting equivalent performance

The role of shifting, updating, and inhibition in prospective memory performance in young and older adults.

“…In nonfocal PM tasks, the PM cue is not part of the information being extracted in service of the ongoing activity (e.g., keeping words in WM, while remembering to press a button whenever the background of the screen shows a particular pattern; Park, Hertzog, Kidder, Morrell, & Mayhorn, 1997). In this case, according to the multiprocess framework , PM is thought to require executive attention to carry out extra monitoring for the cue, which should entail age differences as found in the present study.…”

Socioeconomic status is positively correlated with frontal white matter integrity in aging

“…One cognitive domain known to undergo significant age-related declines is working memory (Babcock and Salthouse 1990;Dobbs and Rule 1989;Park et al 1997;Wiegersma and Meertse 1990), yet age-related declines in working memory may be attenuated by the relative preservation of WM integrity in individuals with high SES. The digit backwards (DB) span test was used to explore this possible relationship because it assesses the fundamental working memory function of maintaining information online (Groeger et al 1999), a function which declines significantly with age (Baddeley 2000).…”

Revisiting the age-prospective memory-paradox: the role of planning and task experience

“…Indeed, studies on age-related differences in PM show a general trend of declined performance in old age compared to young adults (e.g. Luo and Craik 2008;Mäntylä and Nilsson 1997;Maylor 1996;Park et al 1997;West and Craik 2001).…”