Journal article
Differences in time-based task characteristics help to explain the age-prospective memory paradox.
- Haines SJ Australian Catholic University, Melbourne, Australia; La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. Electronic address: s.haines@latrobe.edu.au.
- Randall SE Australian Catholic University, Melbourne, Australia.
- Terrett G Australian Catholic University, Melbourne, Australia.
- Busija L Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.
- Tatangelo G Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia.
- McLennan SN Australian Catholic University, Melbourne, Australia.
- Rose NS University of Notre Dame, South Bend, United States of America.
- Kliegel M University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland.
- Henry JD University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia.
- Rendell PG Australian Catholic University, Melbourne, Australia.
- 2020-06-05
Published in:
- Cognition. - 2020
English
Prior prospective memory (PM) research shows paradoxical findings-young adults outperform older adults in laboratory settings, but the reverse is found in naturalistic settings. Moreover, young-old outperform old-old adults in laboratory settings, but show no age differences in naturalistic settings. Here we highlight how time-based task characteristics have differed systematically between studies conducted in laboratory (time-interval cues) and naturalistic settings (time-of-day cues) and argue that this apparent paradox is a function of comparing disparate task types. In three experiments, we tested this hypothesis using analogous paradigms across settings, with event-based, time-of-day, and time-interval cued PM tasks. Experiment 1 compared young (n = 40) and older (n = 53) adults on a laboratory paradigm that measured PM tasks embedded in a virtual, daily life narrative; and on a conceptually parallel paradigm using a customized smartphone application (MEMO) in actual daily life. Results revealed that on the MEMO, older adults outperformed young adults on the time-of-day tasks but did not differ on the time-interval or event-based task. In contrast, older adults performed worse than young adults in the laboratory. Experiment 2 compared PM performance in young-old (n = 64) and old-old (n = 40) adults using the same paradigms. Young-old outperformed old-old adults in the laboratory; however, group differences were not evident in daily life. Experiment 3 compared young (n = 42) and older (n = 41) adults, and largely replicated the findings of Experiment 1 using a more demanding version of MEMO. These findings provide novel and important insights into the limiting conditions of the age-PM paradox and the need for a finer theoretical delineation of time-based tasks.
- Language
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- English
- Open access status
- closed
- Identifiers
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- DOI 10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104305
- PMID 32497925
- Persistent URL
- https://sonar.ch/global/documents/46804
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