Younger and older adults’ prospective memory: the role of delay task difficulty

ABSTRACT

There is mixed evidence on the impact of delay task difficulty on prospective memory (PM) performance and little research has examined this among older adults. The present study examined younger (N = 60) and older (N = 57) adults’ prospective memory (PM) performance after completing an easy or difficult Raven’s matrices task. To assess whether delay difficulty impacted how often participants thought about their PM intention, participants were asked to report on what they thought about during the delay task itself and retrospectively after all tasks were completed. Younger adults outperformed older adults on the PM task; however, delay task difficulty had no impact PM for either age group. Reports of thinking about the intention during the delay task differed by age group depending whether they were online or retrospective, however, overall greater reports of thinking about the intention was positively associated with PM performance.

KEYWORDS:

• Prospective memory
• younger adults
• older adults
• delay task difficulty
• aging

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank Emily Davis, Amy Holliday, Amanda Krause, Sarah Henderson, Chelsey Masson, and Emily Chemnitz for their assistance with data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. When we ran this analysis controlling for MoCA scores, the results remained the same, such that there was a significant main effect of age group, non-significant main effect of delay condition, and a non-significant age by delay condition interaction.

Additional information

Funding

An NSERC Discovery Grant to CEVM that partially funded the research [RGPIN-2015-03774].