Abstract
The present study investigated the effect of Parkinson’s disease (PD) on prospective memory (PM) tasks by varying the emotional content of the PM actions. Twenty-one older adults with PD and 25 healthy older adults took part in the present study. Participants performed three virtual days in the Virtual Week task. On each virtual day, participants performed actions with positive, negative or neutral content. Immediately following each virtual day, participants completed a recognition task to assess their retrospective memory for the various PM tasks. PD patients were less accurate than the control group at both PM accuracy and recognition task accuracy. The effect of emotional valence was also evident, indicating that all participants were more accurate on positive PM tasks than both negative and neutral. This study confirmed PM impairment in PD patients and extended previous research showing how positive emotional stimuli can influence PM performance.
Highlights
Prospective memory (PM) refers to memory for future intentions and involves remembering to perform an action in response to a specific cue, while being involved in an ongoing activity (McDaniel and Einstein, 2007; Kliegel et al, 2008b)
The results showed that Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients can be as accurate as the control group when they concentrate on the prospective memory (PM) task, suggesting that PM performance can be improved even in PD patients
Results showed that group did not interact with emotional cue (p = 0.214, η2p = 0.03), but there was a main effect of group, F(1,44) = 6.85, p = 0.012, η2p = 0.14, with the people with Parkinson’s (M = 0.71, standard deviation (SD) = 0.28) less accurate than controls (M = 0.84, SD = 0.19)
Summary
Prospective memory (PM) refers to memory for future intentions and involves remembering to perform an action in response to a specific cue, while being involved in an ongoing activity (McDaniel and Einstein, 2007; Kliegel et al, 2008b). The distinctiveness of an emotional cue may reduce the need for controlled monitoring of the cue as its detection is facilitated, and this may result in better PM performance (Kliegel and Jäger, 2006; Murphy and Isaacowitz, 2008). Positive cues improved the prospective component of the PM action, while negative cues improved the retrospective component. The authors’ interpretation of the results indicate the efficacy of emotion in boosting cue saliency, reducing the need for strategic monitoring (May et al, 2012) and that older adults can effectively use emotional cues to help them initiate actions and to minimize repetition errors (May et al, 2015)
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