The influence of ongoing task absorption on preschoolers’ prospective memory with peripheral cues

ABSTRACT

Prospective memory (PM) represents the ability to perform a planned action after a certain delay. Substantial increases of PM have been shown across the ages of preschool children. However, previous studies have mostly focused on PM tasks, in which the PM cue was presented centrally (i.e. inside the centre of attention). The current study examined developmental differences between 3-, 4-, and 5-year old preschoolers using PM tasks, in which the PM cue was presented peripherally and investigated the influence of ongoing task absorption on children’s performance on such tasks. Results showed that PM performance increased over preschool age and that it was affected by ongoing task absorption, with significantly better PM performance on a low- versus a high-absorbing ongoing task. Importantly, age differences were only present in the low- but not in the high-absorbing condition, showing that preschoolers’ PM improves when less cognitive resources are absorbed by the ongoing task.

KEYWORDS:

• Prospective memory
• ongoing task absorption
• preschoolers
• development
• centre of attention

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Lijuan Wang http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9702-4380

Notes

1 Note that the present study was construed to examine cue-centrality (‘inside’ versus ‘outside the center of attention’) and not cue-focality such as conceived by the multiprocess framework which refers to the conceptual overlap of ongoing task and prospective task similar to task-appropriate processing (see McDaniel & Einstein, 2000).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Humanities and Social Sciences Youth Fund of Ministry of Education in China [grant number 19YJCZH256]; Project funded by China Postdoctoral Science Foundation [grant number 2018M641757]; the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [grant number 2412018QD030]; the Swiss National Science Foundation.