The age prospective memory paradox within the same sample in time-based and event-based tasks

ABSTRACT

The present research investigated the age prospective memory (PM) paradox by testing the performance of the same participants on laboratory and naturalistic PM tasks. Younger, middle-aged, and older adults performed three tasks (time-based, event-based with focal cue, and event-based with nonfocal cue); first in the laboratory, then in the context of their everyday lives. Additionally, the social importance of PM tasks was manipulated in the laboratory. As expected, age-dependent declines on the laboratory tasks were reversed in the naturalistic tasks. Middle-aged adults performed as well as younger adults in the laboratory and as well as the elderly outside of the laboratory. When the social importance of laboratory tasks was stressed, the performance of younger adults fell. In addition, older adults showed higher self-reported commitment to the naturalistic tasks than both younger and middle-aged adults. Findings are discussed in the context of possible explanations for the age PM paradox.

Keywords:

• Cognitive aging
• Prospective memory
• Everyday memory
• Compensation
• Motivation

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education Grant NN106 040534 2008–2011 to Grzegorz Sędek. We thank Alicja Leszczyńska, Natalia Walerowska, and Kaja Szarras for assisting in collecting data.

Notes

¹As indicated earlier, we recruited only those adults who had a mobile phone and reported watching the evening news and the evening weather forecast each day.

²Note that these retrospective errors did not decrease the performance on the PM tasks. When we noticed that the participant had switched days, the PM performance was calculated according to the modified schedule.