Redefining the pattern of age-prospective memory-paradox: new insights on age effects in lab-based, naturalistic, and self-assigned tasks

Katharina M Schnitzspahn,Lia Kvavilashvili,Mareike Altgassen

doi:10.1007/s00426-018-1140-2

Abstract

Prospective memory (PM) involves remembering intended actions in the future, such as posting a letter when seeing a post box (event-based PM) or making a phone call at 2:00 pm (time-based PM). Studies on aging and PM have often reported negative age effects in the laboratory, but positive age effects in naturalistic tasks outside the laboratory (the so-called age–PM-paradox). The present study re-examined this pattern of the paradox by studying, for the first time, age differences in time- and event-based PM in lab-based, experimenter-generated naturalistic and self-assigned real-life PM tasks within the same sample of young and older adults. Results showed that differential age effects in and outside the laboratory were qualified by the type of PM cue. While age-related deficits were obtained for laboratory event-based tasks, no age effect was obtained for naturalistic event-based PM. Age benefits in the field were only observed for naturalistic time-based tasks, but not for participants’ own self-assigned time-based tasks. These findings indicate that the age benefits for naturalistic PM tasks may have been overestimated due to the dominant use of experimenter-generated naturalistic time-based PM tasks in previous studies. Therefore, the precise pattern of the age–PM-paradox may need redefining as mostly consisting of negative age effects in lab-based PM tasks and mostly the absence of negative age effects (rather than age benefits) in naturalistic and self-assigned tasks outside the laboratory.

Highlights

Remembering to take one’s medication, pay a bill on time or send a birthday card to a friend are all examples of prospective memory (PM) tasks, which involve self-initiated retrieval of intended actions at a specific moment in the future (Ellis & Kvavilashvili, 2000; Kliegel, McDaniel, & Einstein, 2007)
One of the most surprising and perplexing findings that have emerged from this research concerns a contrasting pattern of age-related PM performance in different task settings: While age-related deficits are often found in standard lab-based PM tasks, age-related benefits occur in naturalistic
Lab-based studies usually involve a dualtask paradigm consisting of an ongoing activity that needs to be interrupted to carry out an additional PM task

Summary

Introduction

Remembering to take one’s medication, pay a bill on time or send a birthday card to a friend are all examples of prospective memory (PM) tasks, which involve self-initiated retrieval of intended actions at a specific moment in the future (Ellis & Kvavilashvili, 2000; Kliegel, McDaniel, & Einstein, 2007). They are often contrasted with retrospective memory tasks, which involve the externally prompted retrieval of past information such as the recall of previously studied words in a free recall test or someone’s name when meeting them for the second time. These ongoing activities may vary in the amount of attentional resources required

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