Focality and prospective memory in preschool children

Abstract

We examined the influence of prospective memory (PM) cue focality in a sample of preschool children. Prior investigations in older populations indicated that focal targets were associated with enhanced PM performance, perhaps through more automatic retrieval processes. Importantly, this influential variable has not been thoroughly explored in younger samples. Over three test sessions, preschool children completed a memory task where they were shown a series of animals. During retrieval, participants were shown all of the animals except for one, and they had to name the missing animal. While engaged in this task, participants in the focal PM condition were instructed to remove particular animals (e.g., spider) from the game if they saw them. In the nonfocal condition, participants were told to remove any animal that was entirely one color (e.g., black) if they saw them during the game. The results demonstrated no difference in PM remembering between focal and nonfocal conditions. These results suggest that the effects of focality may not be present at the beginning stages of PM development. The implications for PM retrieval processes also are discussed.

Keywords:

• Prospective memory
• focality
• preschool children

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the members of the COMIC lab for their dedicated assistance in collecting data for this project. We would also like to thank the teachers, parents, and staff at Suburban Nursery School and PreK, the Child Development Center at Georgia State University, and the Ashley Hall Early Education Center in Charleston, SC.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 We conducted a second analysis that only included participants who had complete data for all three trials. The pattern of results were the same as the ones reported here. Additionally, we ran the very same model on the data as a binary regression with each trial being labeled as a PM hit or PM miss. The pattern of results was the same.