A large-scale comparison of prospective and retrospective memory development from childhood to middle age

Abstract

We present the first large-scale comparison of prospective memory (PM) and retrospective memory (RM) from 8 to 50 years of age (N = 318,614). Participants in an Internet study were asked to remember to click on a smiley face (single-trial event-based PM test) and to indicate whether/where a picture had changed from study to test (single-trial RM test), in both cases after retention intervals filled with working-memory tests and questionnaires. Both PM and RM improved during childhood; however, whereas maximal PM was reached by teenagers, with approximately linear decline through the 20s–40s, RM continued to improve through the 20s and 30s. On both tests, females outperformed males and achieved maximal success at earlier ages. Strikingly, 10–11-year-old girls performed significantly better than females in their late 20s on the PM test. The presence of the smiley face at encoding and temporal uncertainty (expecting it “later” rather than at the “end” of the test) both benefited PM; these effects decreased and increased, respectively, from childhood to middle age. The findings demonstrate that in a cross-sectional study (a) developmental trajectories are qualitatively different between PM and RM, and (b) the relative influence of PM cues differs between younger and older ages.

Keywords:

• Prospective memory
• Retrospective memory
• Development
• Adulthood
• Middle age
• Internet

Acknowledgments

We thank the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Science Division, especially Becky Palmer and Stephen Mather, for their collaboration on this project.

Notes

¹ Binary logistic regressions rather than ANOVAs produced similar findings.

² In addition, note that Logie and Duff (2007) reported a subset of data from the present Internet study and showed that the overall mean scores and split-half reliabilities, together with the pattern of intertask correlations, were all largely consistent with laboratory findings from the same tasks.