Comparing Older and Younger Adults in an Event-Based Prospective Memory Paradigm Containing an Output Monitoring Component

ABSTRACT

Two experiments with younger and older adults were conducted to investigate the output-monitoring component of event-based prospective memory. In the standard form of the task, participants must remember to press a key when a certain class of items is encountered. To evaluate output monitoring, event-based cues were repeated and participants were asked to press a different key if they could remember that an earlier response was made to a particular cue. Younger adults forgot fewer of their successful responses, but displayed a distinct bias to claim that they had responded earlier when actually they had forgotten to respond. By contrast, older adults displayed this bias much less frequently. Elaborated responding to cues had the effect of improving the performance of younger, but not older adults. The results are discussed in terms of natural repetitions and omission errors that might be made in everyday prospective memory tasks.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Portions of this research were funded by The Center for Applied Cognitive Research on Aging, one of the Edward R. Roybal Centers for Research in Applied Gerontology, funded through Grant No. P50 AG11715 from the National Institute on Aging of the National Institutes of Health. We thank Thomas W. Hancock for his assistance in the early stages of carrying out this project.

Notes

¹ The instruction is stressed that the repeat key should only be used when they can remember pressing the first key to that specific item earlier in the task sequence. Because participants are asked to repeat this instruction back, it is not the case that they are confused about the task requirements, and therefore, this paradigm does measure true beliefs and misbeliefs about past performance (see Marsh et al., 2002, for more detailed treatment of this issue).

² Of course, one infelicity to the current methodology is that when a first key is pressed in response to a repeated cue, we do not know if the item's earlier appearance was entirely forgotten or whether participants can identify their earlier failure to respond. Without additional keys to press that might confuse older adults we could devise no ideal method to avoid this interpretative issue. Therefore, the present results should be considered revealing insofar as they represent the first attempt to combine an output-monitoring component to a prospective memory paradigm with older adults, but other issues remain to be explored.