The Role of Extrinsic Rewards and Cue-Intention Association in Prospective Memory in Young Children

Abstract

The current study examined, for the first time, the effect of cue-intention association, as well as the effects of promised extrinsic rewards, on prospective memory in young children, aged 5-years-old (n = 39) and 7-years-old (n = 40). Children were asked to name pictures for a toy mole, whilst also having to remember to respond differently to certain target pictures (prospective memory task). The level to which the target picture was associated with the intention was manipulated across two conditions (low- or high-association) for all participants, whilst half of the participants were promised a reward for good prospective memory performance. Results showed a main effect of age, with the 7-year-olds outperforming the 5-year-olds. Furthermore, there was a main effect of reward, with those promised a reward performing better than those who were not. No effect was found for cue-association, with the participants of both age groups performing equally well in both association conditions. No significant interactions were found between any of the variables. The potentially important role of reward in young children’s everyday prospective memory tasks, and possible reasons for the lack of a reflexive-associative effect, are discussed.

Effects of Episodic Future Thinking and Self-Projection on Children’s Prospective Memory Performance

“…Specifically, compared to the baseline ongoing task condition the younger age group deteriorated more strongly in the dual-task condition. This is in line with Mahy, Moses’ [ 11 ] suggestion that individuals with less cognitive resources (in this study preschoolers) are more strongly affected by adding another task to the ongoing task (see also [ 55 ] for similar effects). However, importantly, controlling for baseline ongoing task performance only influenced the age group effect, while the effect of EFT encoding was still significant.…”

“…If no answer was made within this time window, the next picture was presented. Following Sheppard, Kretschmer’s [ 55 ] approach, baseline ongoing task performance was assessed by asking children to name 10 objects. Moreover, the number of ongoing task items presented during the PM block (ongoing and PM tasks) was adapted for the two age groups.…”

Adolescent Basic Facial Emotion Recognition Is Not Influenced by Puberty or Own-Age Bias

“…Thus, based on performance levels alone, we cannot exclude the presence of a pubertal dip. However, reaction times (which are a more sensitive measure, Sheppard et al, 2015 ) also did not show a pubertal dip, but rather an increase in speed with increasing age which clearly argues against a pubertal dip. Moreover, variability in reaction times was similar as in the target study that found a pubertal dip in reaction times only ( McGivern et al, 2002 ).…”

Event versus activity-based cues and motivation in school-related prospective memory tasks

“…In sum, because previous studies have shown that motivation (e.g. [9,12,13]) and type of PM task (activity- vs. event-based) influence children’s performance in PM tasks [8], we sought to explore whether motivation and type of PM task influenced the prospective memory performance of school-age children and whether these variables interacted with each other and modulated their possible effects. Because the nature of the OT task seems to also influence PM performance, an important feature of our study was that we explored children’s PM performance in the context of natural tasks that were close to the types of activities that children usually perform at school and by adapting the difficulty of the OT tasks to the participants’ ages.…”