Young Children's Deliberate Reminding

Prospective memory in children: The effects of age and task interruption.

“…Our paradigm permits the collection of several responses in a single session. Furthermore, the use of a standardized setting provides the control necessary to eliminate the influence of extraneous or confounding variables which may be present in other investigations (e.g., Somerville et al, 1983). In addition, since the ongoing task involves naming the pictures and not reading the words (see Passolunghi et al, 1995), there is also a potential for our method to be used in two or three year old children.…”

“…It is interesting that these ideas have found initial support in a naturalistic study of Somerville et al (1983) in which 2-, 3-, and 4-year-old children were assigned to different reminding tasks by their caregivers over a two week period. Two important findings emerged from this study.…”

“…Although prospective memory research has been gradually expanding over the past twenty years (particularly since 1990 when some simple and efficient laboratory methods were developed, see Einstein & McDaniel, 1990), there only exist a handful of studies on prospective memory in children (see Beal, 1988;Ceci, Baker, & Bronfenbrenner, 1988;Ceci & Bronfenbrenner, 1985;Guajardo & Best, 2000;Kerns, 2000;Meacham & Colombo, 1980;Meacham & Dumitru, 1976;Passolunghi, Brandimonte, & Cornoldi, 1995;Somerville, Wellman, & Cultice, 1983). Moreover, these studies have been conducted over considerable time intervals by various researchers who explored different variables with different tasks and, as a result, there is no coherent picture of the development of prospective memory skills in children.…”

The delay period as an opportunity to think about future intentions: Effects of delay length and delay task difficulty on young adult’s prospective memory performance

“…Participants had to remember to remind the experimenter what to do when passing a certain location on campus or saying when a certain amount of time had elapsed. Similarly, a naturalistic study with 2-to 4-year-old children found that children were better at reminding their mothers to do something after shorter delays (5-10 minutes) compared to longer delays (6-12 hours; Somerville, Wellman, & Cultice, 1983). Importantly, in everyday life, individuals are more likely to complete several different tasks during a longer delay compared to a shorter delay.…”

“…Although the majority of studies have found no effect (e.g., Einstein, Holland, McDaniel, & Guynn, 1992;Guynn, McDaniel, & Einstein, 1998;Stone, Dismukes, & Remington, 2001) or a negative impact of a longer delay interval on PM performance (e.g., Brandimonte & Passolunghi, 1994;Johansson, Andersson, & Ronnberg, 2000;McBride, Coane, Drwal, & LaRose, 2013;Nigro, Senese, Natullo, & Sergi, 2002;Somerville, Wellman, & Cultice, 1983;Tierney, Bucks, Weinborn, Hodgson, & Woods, 2016), two studies have found a positive impact of a longer delay on PM (Hicks, Marsh, & Russell, 2000;Mahy & Moses, 2011). Hicks, Marsh, and Russell (2000) examined the impact of delay interval length on young adults' PM in a series of experiments.…”