Episodic foresight and aging.

Abstract

Decline in episodic memory is one of the most prominent cognitive deficits seen in late adulthood. It is therefore surprising that few studies have examined how the related capacity for episodic foresight might also be affected in this age group. Preliminary evidence suggests that older adults show deficits in generating phenomenological characteristics of future events, but the critical question of whether such deficits extend to generating and executing appropriate future intentions remains to be addressed. Here, we present 2 studies. In Study 1, we report the results of our pilot testing, which was used to develop and validate stimuli for the first measure of this construct that is appropriate for use in adult populations. In Study 2, we administer this measure to 40 older and 40 younger adults. The results indicate that, relative to their younger counterparts, older adults are less likely to spontaneously acquire items that would later allow a problem to be solved, and are also less likely to subsequently use these items to solve the problems. These data provide important initial evidence that the capacity to apply episodic foresight in a functionally adaptive way is impaired in late adulthood. The results also provide important validation data for a novel measure of episodic foresight that has potential application to many other groups, including clinical groups known to have difficulties anticipating and planning for the future.

Episodic foresight and schizophrenia

“…While the absence of any associations between episodic foresight with verbal learning or executive control was unexpected, as predicted a significant relationship did emerge between more general intellectual capacity and foresightful preparatory behaviour in people with schizophrenia. These data complement previous findings showing a significant relationship between crystallized intelligence and episodic foresight in late adulthood (see Lyons et al, 2014). However, while Lyons et al (2014) used the NART (Nelson, 1982), which tests crystallized intelligence via knowledge of word pronunciation, the measure used in the present study (the WASI) additionally taps more fluid intellectual abilities.…”

“…Critically, the VW-Foresight contains no instructions to perform tasks and, rather, requires that participants independently identify problems, acquire items to resolve those problems, and subsequently apply those acquired items to resolve the problems. Participants learn the impetus of the game by completing an experimenterassisted Trial Day, in which they are prompted to carry out the foresight tasks (see Lyons et al, 2014 for a detailed description).…”

“…They were able to remember single novel problem events sufficiently to secure future solutions at a different place in time and space. Lyons, Henry, Rendell, Corballis, and Suddendorf (2014) adapted a task meeting these criteria for adults and subsequently found that, relative to young adults, healthy older adults had greater difficulty securing future solutions at different places in time and space.…”

“…In service of this goal, we used a newly developed measure, Virtual Week-Foresight (VW-Foresight, see Figure 1). This measure requires participants to apply episodic foresight to successfully self-generate the intentions to resolve multiple independent problems (see Lyons et al, 2014). VW-Foresight is based on a well-validated and extensively researched prospective memory measure, Virtual Week (Rendell & Craik, 2000;Rendell & Henry, 2009), but modified to meet strict criteria for demonstrating episodic foresight (Suddendorf & Corballis, 2007).…”

The relationship between prospective memory and episodic future thinking in younger and older adulthood

“…Specifically, because of considerable prior evidence showing that the capacity for future-oriented cognition may be reduced for older relative to younger adults (see Henry, MacLeod, Phillips, & Crawford, 2004, for a review;Lyons, Henry, Rendell, Corballis, & Suddendorf, 2014;Addis, Musicaro, Pan, & Schacter, 2010;Addis et al, 2008), and because age is known to disrupt many of the cognitive abilities likely to be important to engage in both types of prospective thought (e.g. Prull, Gabrielli, & Bunge, 2000;Salthouse, 2000), we tested younger and older adulthood separately.…”