Prospective memory, emotional valence and ageing

Abstract

Emotional factors have been found to be an important influence on memory. The current study investigated the influence of emotional salience and age on a laboratory measure of prospective memory (PM); Virtual Week. Thirty young and 30 old adults completed Virtual Week, in which the emotional salience of the tasks at encoding was manipulated to be positive, negative or neutral in content. For event-based, but not time-based tasks, positivity enhancement in both age groups was seen, with a greater number of positive PM tasks being performed relative to neutral tasks. There was no negativity enhancement effect. Older adults showed generally poorer levels of PM, but they also demonstrated greater beneficial effects of positive valence compared to young. These effects of emotion on PM accuracy do not appear to reflect the retrospective component of the task as a different pattern of emotion effects was seen on the recall of PM content. Results indicate that older adults' difficulties in prospective remembering can be reduced where the tasks to be remembered are positive.

Keywords:

• Prospective memory
• Emotional saliency
• Emotional valence
• Positivity enhancement
• Ageing
• Event- and time-based

Acknowledgements

Support for this study was provided by a Discovery Project grant from the Australian Research Council.

We acknowledge the help of Trevor Daniels in programming Virtual Week.

Notes

¹In the original study (Rendell & Craik, 2000), age differences were substantial on time-check but minimal on both regular event- and time-based. In both studies a stop clock was used for time-check but the time-based tasks used times marked on squares in the earlier study and a clock in the current study. Hence, in earlier studies the distinction between event- and time-based tasks may have been blurred with times on board functioning as event cues.

²The significant main effect for age on PM accuracy remained after covarying out recall of the content in an ANCOVA.