Adult age differences in remembering gain- and loss-related intentions

ABSTRACT

Motivational and emotional changes across adulthood have a profound impact on cognition. In this registered report, we conducted an experimental investigation of motivational influence on remembering intentions after a delay (prospective memory; PM) in younger, middle-aged, and older adults, using gain- and loss-framing manipulations. The present study examined for the first time whether motivational framing in a PM task has different effects on younger and older adults’ PM performance (N = 180; age range: 18–85 years) in a controlled laboratory setting. Based on lifespan theories of motivation, we assumed that the prevention of losses becomes more relevant with increasing age: We expected that older adults show relatively higher PM performance in a task with loss-related consequences following PM failure than in a task in which successful PM leads to gains. The opposite pattern of performance was expected for younger adults. The findings suggest that the relevance of reward and positive gain-related consequences for successful remembering appears to decrease with age. As hypothesised, a motivational framing × age interaction indicated that age differences in memory performance were smaller with loss-related than gain-related consequences, supporting a loss-prevention view on motivated cognition.

KEYWORDS:

• Gains and losses
• cognitive aging
• motivational orientation
• lifespan psychology
• prospective memory

Acknowledgement

We thank Eliane Timm, Simon Graf, Andreas Göldi, Quincy Rondei for help with data collection and the members of the Life-Management Team at the University of Zurich for helpful comments on parts of this project. Sebastian Horn acknowledges support from the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant #100019-185463). Open data, the registration protocol, and online supplemental materials for this study are available at: doi.org/10.17605/osf.io/9pwcd

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Exploratory analyses are reported in a separate section of the text to clearly distinguish between confirmatory and exploratory research.

2 We thank an anonymous reviewer for the suggestion to consider the additional covariates “survey-assessed motivational orientation” and “type of payoff” in the present study, which are reported in the section “Exploratory Analyses” (see also Online Supplement 4 to 6).

3 The raw data from all participants in the present analyses (including the data from five participants whose data were discarded following the preregistered exclusion criteria) are available at doi.org/10.17605/osf.io/9pwcd. The data were collected after the in-principle acceptance of the stage-1 report (i.e., after 10 December 2019), from January to December 2020 (following local health and safety regulations); data collection had to be interrupted between mid-March and mid-July 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung: [Grant Number 100019_185463].