Event-based prospective memory and everyday forgetting in healthy older adults and individuals with mild cognitive impairment

Abstract

An event-based nonfocal task was used to evaluate prospective memory (PM) and the relationship between PM, neuropsychological testing data, and everyday forgetting. Twenty-four participants with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and 24 age- and education-matched cognitively healthy adults responded to a nonfocal PM cue, while completing an ongoing working memory task. Neuropsychological testing data and self- and informant-report of frequency of forgetting were also gathered. Compared to healthy adults, the MCI participants exhibited significantly poorer prospective remembering and ongoing task performance, despite similar self-reported effort directed to the PM task. Both self- and informant-report indicated that the MCI group was experiencing a higher frequency of everyday forgetting than the healthy adult group. Self-report of everyday forgetting was correlated with PM task performance for the healthy adults, but not for the MCI participants. For the healthy adults, correlational analyses also showed significant relationships between PM accuracy and tests of memory and executive functioning, suggesting that both spontaneous retrieval processes and effortful, strategic monitoring may be important in supporting prospective remembering for this nonfocal PM task. The stronger relationships between PM accuracy and memory and language tests for the MCI group suggest that their poorer event-based prospective remembering might be linked to impaired spontaneous retrieval processes, which are thought to be supported by medial temporal structures.

Keywords:

• Mild cognitive impairment
• Prospective memory
• Nonfocal cue
• Everyday memory
• Dementia

Acknowledgments

We thank Scott Creamer, Michelle Langill, Kimberly Lanni, and Alicia Rueda for their help in coordinating data collection. We also thank the members of the Aging and Dementia Research Team for their help in collecting and scoring the data. Portions of this research were presented at the National Academy of Neuropsychology's 31st Annual Meeting, Marco Island, FL, USA. This research was funded in part by an Edward R. Meyer Project Award; NIBIB (National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering; Grant R01 EB009675); and NSF (National Science Foundation; Grant DGE-0900781). No financial or other relationships exist that could be interpreted as a conflict of interest pertaining to this manuscript.