Influence of Ongoing Task Difficulty and Motivation Level on Children’s Prospective Memory in a Chinese Sample

Abstract

Prospective memory (PM) is the process associated with the task of realizing delayed intentions in the future. Researchers distinguish two types of PM, namely time-based PM (tbPM) and event-based PM (ebPM). Experiment 1 investigated the developmental trajectory of 3- to 5-year-old preschool children’s PM ability, and the occurrence of delayed retrieval (children execute the PM task in a larger window of opportunity) in both tbPM and ebPM tasks. Results revealed that the 5-year-old children outperformed the 3- and 4-year-old children in PM. Moreover, delayed retrieval was more likely to occur in tbPM task than in ebPM task. In Experiment 2, the influence of ongoing task (OT) difficulty on PM performance was investigated with a sample of 5-year-old children. Results revealed no significant effect of OT difficulty on PM performance. In Experiment 3, we improved children’s motivation level to complete the OT, then explored the influence of OT difficulty on children’s PM performance. Results revealed that the effect of OT difficulty on PM performance became significant after increasing the children’s motivation to complete the OT. These results provide insights into the mechanism of attentional resource allocation in PM tasks and have crucial educational and social implications.

The Practice Effect on Time-Based Prospective Memory: The Influences of Ongoing Task Difficulty and Delay

“…EBPM needs to be executed when specific situations or clues appear. TBPM needs to be executed at a definite time point or after a certain time span (Einstein and McDaniel, 1990; Han et al, 2017). Prospective memory consists of prospective component referring to remembering that something has to be done and retrospective component referring to what has to be done (Meier and Zimmermann, 2015).…”

Event versus activity-based cues and motivation in school-related prospective memory tasks

“…In general, motivation seems to affect the probability that children remember the PM intention [11–14]. For example, Han et al [12] required children to correctly place coloured balls (previously associated with a specific animal) below the corresponding animals. In addition, they had to give a model bone to a dog (PM task) whenever they encountered the target dog in the OT.…”

“…In addition, they had to give a model bone to a dog (PM task) whenever they encountered the target dog in the OT. In their Experiment 3, Han et al [12] manipulated the difficulty of the OT by including three or five possible animal–colour pairs. They also manipulated the children’s motivation by offering a prize to half of the children if they performed well on the OT.…”

“…In sum, because previous studies have shown that motivation (e.g. [9,12,13]) and type of PM task (activity- vs. event-based) influence children’s performance in PM tasks [8], we sought to explore whether motivation and type of PM task influenced the prospective memory performance of school-age children and whether these variables interacted with each other and modulated their possible effects. Because the nature of the OT task seems to also influence PM performance, an important feature of our study was that we explored children’s PM performance in the context of natural tasks that were close to the types of activities that children usually perform at school and by adapting the difficulty of the OT tasks to the participants’ ages.…”

A Pilot Study of the Reliability and Agreement of Heart Rate, Respiratory Rate and Short-Term Heart Rate Variability in Elite Modern Pentathlon Athletes

“…Body mass status was measured using Body Mass Index (BMI) defined as body mass (kilograms) divided by the squared height (meters). A questionnaire that supports the collection and control of many confounding variables influencing HRV proposed by Laborde et al [ 56 ] was used. The athletes were informed in detail about the objectives of the study and measurement protocol by telephone conversations 3 months before and 2 weeks before the measurements, and also by e-mail with instructions and study procedures.…”