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

Abstract

Children often fail to remember executing intentions because prospective memory (PM) does not completely develop until late adolescence or young adulthood. PM failures are often observed in children and can have negative consequences on their everyday lives. Thus, in the last 50 years, various strategies to support children’s PM have been designed and evaluated, such as prompting children to use different encoding modalities, such as verbal, visual, and enacted modalities, or encoding strategies, such as implementation intentions, episodic future thinking (EFT), and performance predictions, as well as providing children with verbal and visual reminders. However, not all these interventions have shown to efficiently enhance PM performance during childhood. The present literature review is aimed at summarizing these interventions and critically examining their effectiveness from a developmental perspective and by considering underlying mechanisms. The type of PM task (event-, time-, and activity-based), cognitive resource demands, and processing overlaps are also considered. Finally, directions for future research and possible applications in everyday life will be discussed.

Habitual prospective memory in preschool children

“…In this habitual PM context, we also examined the influence of cue visibility. Previous research in children indicated that having a visual reminder of the intention improves PM performance [ 14 , 24 ]. Interestingly, after 8 instances of retrieving the intention in Experiment 1, removing the box from participant’s line of sight had no effect on performance.…”

“…This model predicts that individuals with poor EF will show poor PM performance, and that PM performance should improve as EF develops. While development in other domains are also relevant to PM performance (see Cottini [ 14 ] for a review), the majority of research with children has focused on how cognitive resource demands and availability affect performance.…”

“…Given that PM performance in children appears highly dependent on available cognitive resources, it would be expected that variables that manipulate the need to use these resources would impact PM performance. For example, Cottini recently reviewed research on the effectiveness of visual reminders for children and found that these reminders consistently improved PM performance [ 14 ]. Her analysis suggests that by having a clearly visible representation of the intention, visual reminders free up cognitive resources, thereby reducing the risk of failure due to resource depletion when attention is allocated elsewhere.…”