The effects of ongoing task absorption on event-based prospective memory in preschoolers

Abstract

The current study applied a 2 × 2 experimental design to investigate the effects of ongoing task absorption on event-based prospective memory performance of children aged 3 and 5 years. Children were required to label pictures as ongoing task but to remember to refrain from picture naming and to respond to the target cues in a different way as the prospective memory task. Two differently absorbing ongoing tasks (high absorbing scenario game task vs. low absorbing computer-based task) were administered. Results indicated that prospective memory performance of 5-year-old children was significantly better than that of 3-year-old children. Ongoing task absorption affected the ongoing task performance of preschoolers, but not overall prospective memory performance. Only the 3-year-olds were negatively affected by high ongoing task absorption, which was not the case for the 5-year-olds. The findings are discussed within the light of the multiprocess theory.

Keywords:

• Event-based prospective memory
• preschoolers
• ongoing task absorption
• scenario game task
• computerized task

Acknowledgements

Matthias Kliegel acknowledges financial support from the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Notes

1 First, 150 images were selected from the Internet. We subsequently asked participants who were recruited for the materials screening (n = 60; M _3-year = 3.54, SD = .31; M _5-year = 5.51, SD = .28) to name these pictures. Fifty pictures with an accuracy proportion of 70–90% in each age group were selected. Average accuracy of naming the selected images did not differ between the two age groups, χ² = .02, p = .886. Second, given the different styles of the pictures, we invited an art student from the Art and Design Institute of Shenyang Normal University to depict the selected images on A4 paper to generate uniform pictures. All these pictures were photographed with a digital camera (12 megapixels), and the digital pictures were used in the formal experiment (printed on real cards or presented with E-Prime in the computer condition).