Prospective and retrospective memory in normal aging and dementia: An experimental study

Abstract

Two experiments investigatedthe effects of normal aging and dementia on laboratory-basedprospective memory (PM) tasks. Participants viewed a film for a later recognition memory task. In Experiment 1, they were also required either to say "animal" when an animal appeared in the film (event-based PM task) or to stop a clock every 3 min (time-based PM task). In both tasks, young participants were more successful than older participants, who were, in turn, more successful than patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD). For successful remembering in the time-based task, older participants and AD patients checked the clock more often than did young participants. In Experiment 2, participants were asked to reset a clock either when an animal appeared in the film (unrelated cue-action) or when a clock appeared in the film (related cue-action). Responses were faster in the related condition than in the unrelated condition. Again, there were differences in PM performance between young and older participants, and between older participants and AD patients. The observed deficits were not due to the forgetting of the PM task instructions in either experiment. Retrospective memory (RM) tasks (digit span, sentence span, free recall, and recognition) were more impaired by AD than were the PM tasks. Factor analysis revealed separate factors corresponding to RM and PM.

Is prospective memory enhanced by cue-action semantic relatedness and enactment at encoding?

“…The mean proportion of cues that elicited a correct response at the appropriate moment in each Method of Encoding x Cue-Action Relatedness x Age Group condition was calculated, and is displayed in Figure 1. Prospective memory performance conditional on retrospective recall of PM task content Maylor et al (2002), among others, have suggested that participants may perform poorly in a PM task, not necessarily because of a PM failure but because of a retrospective memory failure i.e., failure to recall the content of the PM task. As Table 1 illustrates, most participants correctly recalled all 6 cue-action word pairs on completion of the ongoing task.…”

Age effects in prospective memory performance within older adults: the paradoxical impact of implementation intentions

“…Some studies reported significant age effects (e.g. Maylor et al 2002;Smith and Bayen 2006;West and Craik 2001;Zimmerman and Meier 2006), while others failed to obtain age effects (e.g. Cherry and Plauche 2004;Marsh et al 2007;Reese and Cherry, 2002).…”

Learning is impaired by activated intentions

“…There is no recording of the intention on a to-do list; rather, the person is relying on the environmental cue to trigger recollection of the intention at a time when it is convenient to fulfill the task. The fragility of this type of memory is amply demonstrated by the numerous variables that have been shown to affect it-namely, how engrossed one is in other activities (e.g., Marsh, Hancock, & Hicks, 2002;, how distinctive or familiar the cue is from the background (McDaniel & Einstein, 1993), whether the current context matches the encoding context (McDaniel, Robinson-Riegler, & Einstein, 1998), and whether one is impaired by aging (e.g., Maylor, 1998) or by being a member of a neuropsychologically impaired population (Maylor, Smith, Della Sala, & Logie, 2002). From this perspective it is amazing that people successfully rely on this strategy in their everyday life, but they do (Marsh, Hicks, & Landau, 1998).…”