The relationship between prospective memory and episodic future thinking in younger and older adulthood

Abstract

Episodic future thinking (EFT), the ability to project into the future to “preexperience” an event, and prospective memory (PM), remembering to perform an intended action, are both examples of future-oriented cognition. Recently it has been suggested that EFT might contribute to PM performance but to date few studies have examined the relationship between these two capacities. The aim of the present study was to investigate the nature and specificity of this relationship, as well as whether it varies with age. Participants were 125 younger and 125 older adults who completed measures of EFT and PM. Significant, positive correlations between EFT and PM were identified in both age groups. Furthermore, EFT ability accounted for significant unique variance in the young adults, suggesting that it may make a specific contribution to PM function. Within the older adult group, EFT did not uniquely contribute to PM, possibly indicating a reduced capacity to utilize EFT, or the use of compensatory strategies. This study is the first to provide systematic evidence for an association between variation in EFT and PM abilities in both younger and older adulthood and shows that the nature of this association varies as a function of age.

Keywords:

• Prospective memory
• Episodic future thinking
• Autobiographical Interview
• Virtual Week

Notes

¹We thank Donna Addis for providing advice and detailed manuals for Autobiographical Interview administration and scoring procedures consistent with Addis et al. (2008), and for data and information allowing inter-rater reliabilities to be calculated between the scorer in the current study and those from her lab.

²As part of another study, participants were directed to use different encoding strategies when performing some of the PM tasks. Analyses of the overall PM score (the index of PM ability used in this study) revealed that there was no interaction between age and encoding condition, and, furthermore, a similar pattern of results to those reported below was obtained when encoding condition was controlled for in the multiple regression analyses. In the interests of parsimony, therefore, the analyses reported in this paper do not include effects of the encoding condition manipulation.

³To test for a nonlinear relation between EFT and PM, regression analyses were re-run to include both linear and quadratic EFT terms. The nonlinear effect did not account for a significant amount of unique variance in PM beyond the linear effect for either group: R² change young, F(1, 119) = 3.05, p = .083; old, F(1, 119) = 3.05, p < .001.