Age benefits in everyday prospective memory: The influence of personal task importance, use of reminders and everyday stress

ABSTRACT

The present diary study examined everyday prospective memory tasks in younger and old adults and explored the role of personal task importance, use of reminders and everyday stress as possible correlates of age-related prospective memory performance in everyday life. Results revealed an age benefit in everyday prospective memory tasks. In addition, task importance was identified as a critical moderator of age-related prospective memory performance. More frequent use of reminders and lower levels of stress, however, were associated with better prospective memory performance in general but did not contribute to age-related prospective memory performance. Exploring further possible correlates of prospective memory revealed that the strategy to reprioritize initially planned intentions was associated with age benefits in everyday prospective memory. Results suggest that the age-related benefit observed in experimenter-given tasks transfers to everyday prospective memory and varies in dependence of motivational and cognitive factors. Implications for theoretical models of prospective memory and aging are discussed.

Keywords:

• Prospective memory
• Ecological validity
• Task importance

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the participants of the present study for their time and effort. Andreas Ihle received support from the German National Academic Foundation and Matthias Kliegel was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Peter Rendell was supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant.

Notes

¹ The three measures ‘PM performance’ (i.e., PM accuracy), ‘reprioritized intentions’, and ‘non-completed intentions’ were calculated as follows. All terms in the following equations are absolute number of intentions, while their results are percentages. All were aggregated over the 5 experimental days: (a) PM performance = PM hits/(all initially formed intentions minus reprioritized intentions); (b) non-completed intentions = reprioritized intentions + forgotten intentions; and (c) to standardize reprioritized intentions on the overall number of non-completed intentions accounting for differences in number of intentions: reprioritized intentions = reprioritized intentions/non-completed intention.