Specialization of amygdala subregions in emotion processing.

The amygdala is important for human fear processing. However, recent research has failed to reveal specificity, with evidence that the amygdala also responds to other emotions. A more nuanced understanding of the amygdala's role in emotion processing, particularly relating to fear, is needed given the importance of effective emotional functioning for everyday function and mental health. We studied 86 healthy participants (44 females), aged 18-49 (mean 26.12 ± 6.6) years, who underwent multiband functional magnetic resonance imaging. We specifically examined the reactivity of four amygdala subregions (using regions of interest analysis) and related brain connectivity networks (using generalized psycho-physiological interaction) to fear, angry, and happy facial stimuli using an emotional face-matching task. All amygdala subregions responded to all stimuli (p-FDR < .05), with this reactivity strongly driven by the superficial and centromedial amygdala (p-FDR < .001). Yet amygdala subregions selectively showed strong functional connectivity with other occipitotemporal and inferior frontal brain regions with particular sensitivity to fear recognition and strongly driven by the basolateral amygdala (p-FDR < .05). These findings suggest that amygdala specialization to fear may not be reflected in its local activity but in its connectivity with other brain regions within a specific face-processing network.

Parkinson's disease disrupts the ability to initiate and apply episodic foresight.

OBJECTIVE: While Parkinson's disease is associated with impairments in many aspects of prospective cognition, no study to date has tested whether these difficulties extend to problems using episodic foresight to guide future-directed behavior. To provide the first examination of whether people with Parkinson's disease are impaired in their capacity to initiate and apply episodic foresight. METHOD: People with Parkinson's disease (n = 42), and a demographically matched neurotypical comparison group (n = 42) completed a validated behavioral assessment that met strict criteria for assessing episodic foresight (Virtual Week-Foresight), as well as a broader neurocognitive and clinical test battery. RESULTS: People with Parkinson's disease were significantly less likely than the comparison group to acquire items that would later allow a problem to be solved and were also less likely to subsequently use these items for problem resolution. These deficits were largely unrelated to performance on other cognitive measures or clinical characteristics of the disorder. CONCLUSIONS: The ability to engage in episodic foresight in an adaptive way is compromised in Parkinson's disease. This appears to be a stable feature of the disorder, and one that is distinct from other clinical symptoms and neurocognitive deficits. It is now critical to establish exactly why these difficulties exist and how they impact on real-life functional capacity.

Self-initiating and applying episodic foresight in middle childhood.

This study provides an important extension to the growing literature on prospection in children by providing the first test of whether one's ability to engage in the functional (as opposed to the purely phenomenological) aspect of episodic foresight improves across middle childhood. Of the various forms of prospection, episodic foresight has been proposed to be one of the most flexible and functionally powerful, defined as the ability to not only imagine future events (simulative aspect) but also use those imaginings to guide behavior in the present (functional aspect). The current study tested 80 typically developing children aged 8 to 12 years using an extensive cognitive battery comprising Virtual Week Foresight, the Autobiographical Interview, and a series of crystallized and fluid intelligence measures. Whereas data indicated age-related improvements in detecting future-oriented problems and taking steps in the present in service of solving these, all children in this age bracket demonstrated a similar capacity for problem resolution (i.e., the ability to subsequently solve successfully identified problems). Results also revealed the importance of broader crystallized and fluid intelligence, but not episodic memory or episodic future thinking, in engaging in this capacity. Research is now required to understand the real-life consequences of episodic foresight during this developmental period as well as the ways in which parents and teachers can help to foster this capacity and consequently help to support children's growing desire for independence during this time.

Event-Based but Not Time-Based Prospective Memory Is Related to Oral Health in Late Adulthood.

BACKGROUND: Most evidence now indicates that cognitive function is related to poorer oral health in late adulthood, but that this relationship is not invariant across specific cognitive domains. Prospective memory (PM) is a core memory skill that refers to memory for future intentions and is known to be related to the formation of habits such as tooth flossing. However, the relationship between PM and oral health has been subject to only limited empirical study. OBJECTIVE: The two studies reported in this paper were designed to test whether PM is related to oral health in older adults of varying vulnerability status. METHODS: Study 1 sampled community-dwelling older adults (N = 172) living independently in the community; Study 2 sampled older adults living in a retirement village (N = 32). Participants in both studies were asked to complete a behavioural measure of PM, with their oral health indexed via self-report (Study 1) or an objective oral health exam (Study 2). RESULTS: In both studies, relationships emerged between event-based PM and oral health, with Study 2 showing that these relationships were specific to oral health measures of plaque and calculus. CONCLUSIONS: Older adults are particularly vulnerable to dental pathology, with important implications for their broader health and well-being. By showing that there is a relationship between oral health and a particular type of PM, this work will have potential implications for the development of more effective interventions focused on enhancing oral health outcomes in this group, such as those focused on strengthening habit formation.

Age Differences in Emotion Regulation and Facial Muscle Reactivity to Emotional Films.

BACKGROUND: Age-related declines in many cognitive abilities are common in healthy aging. However, the ability to effectively regulate emotions is preserved, and possibly even enhanced, in late adulthood. This capacity has been examined most commonly in relation to low-intensity emotional stimuli that typically involve static pictures. Evidence is suggesting that older adults may become overwhelmed when exposed to emotional cues of heightened intensity. OBJECTIVE: In the current study, we assessed whether older adults retain the ability to regulate emotions successfully when exposed to more emotionally evocative (e.g., dynamic) stimuli. METHODS: Young and older adults were instructed to regulate, using expressive suppression, their outward behavioral expression of emotions while viewing dynamic stimuli involving amusing and sad films. Facial reactivity, as indexed using electromyography, self-rated emotional experience, and memory for the stimuli were assessed. RESULTS: The results showed that, relative to young adults, older adults were unable to suppress zygomaticus (cheek) activity to amusing films or corrugator (brow) reactivity to sad films, which is likely due to their relatively reduced facial muscle reactivity. Expressive suppression did not affect young or older adults' subjective feelings or memory for the stimuli. CONCLUSION: Our findings suggest that there are age differences in facial muscle reactivity to amusing and sad cues of heightened intensity. These findings suggest that older adults' ability to effectively regulate emotions may be limited, at least with expressive suppression, in the context of high-intensity emotional cues. Further research is needed to investigate possible exceptions the preservation of emotion regulation in older adults.

The relationship between episodic future thinking and prospective memory in middle childhood: Mechanisms depend on task type.

Episodic future thinking (EFT), the ability to imagine experiencing a future event, and prospective memory (PM), the ability to remember and carry out a planned action, are core aspects of future-oriented cognition that have individually been the focus of research attention in the developmental literature. However, the relationship between EFT and PM, including the extent to which it varies with PM task type, remains poorly delineated, particularly in middle childhood. The current study tested this relationship in 62 typically developing children aged 8-12 years. Results indicated that EFT ability was significantly related to performance on three types of PM tasks (regular and irregular event based and regular time based). Age was not found to moderate the relationship. Children's performance on the retrospective memory component of the PM tasks mediated the relationship between EFT ability and their performance on three types of PM tasks. For irregular event-based tasks, however, EFT made an additional significant contribution. This study adds to the limited empirical literature supporting a relationship between EFT and PM in this age band and supports theoretical models arguing that EFT ability may support PM performance by strengthening the encoding of PM task details in retrospective memory. However, additional mechanisms were also indicated for irregular event-based PM tasks, possibly involving strengthening of cue-context associations. These data show for the first time that the contribution of EFT to children's PM performance varies across task types. This study provides an important and novel contribution to current understanding of the processes that underlie PM development.

Intranasal oxytocin does not reduce age-related difficulties in social cognition.

Oxytocin is a neuropeptide that plays a key role in social processing and there are several studies suggesting that intranasally administered oxytocin may enhance social cognitive abilities and visual attention in healthy and clinical groups. However, there are very few studies to date that have investigated the potential benefits of intranasal oxytocin (iOT) on older adults' social cognitive abilities. This is a surprising omission, because relative to their younger counterparts, older adults also exhibit a range of social cognitive difficulties and also show differences in the way they visually attend to social information. Therefore, we tested the effect of iOT (24 IU) versus a placebo spray on 59 older and 61 younger adults' social cognitive abilities and visual attention using a double-blind placebo-controlled within-groups design. While iOT provided no overall age-related benefit on social cognitive abilities, the key finding to emerge was that iOT improved ToM ability in both age-groups when the task had minimal contextual information, but not when the task had enriched contextual information. Interestingly, iOT had gender specific effects during a ToM task with minimal context. For males in both age-groups, iOT reduced gazing to the social aspects of the scenes (i.e., faces & bodies), and for females, iOT eliminated age differences in gaze patterns that were observed in the placebo condition. These effects on eye-gaze were not observed in a very similar ToM task that included more enriched contextual information. Overall, these findings highlight the interactive nature of iOT with task related factors (e.g., context), and are discussed in relation to the social salience hypothesis of oxytocin.

Prospective Memory Is a Key Predictor of Functional Independence in Older Adults.

OBJECTIVES: Prospective memory (PM), the ability to execute delayed intentions, has received increasing attention in neuropsychology and gerontology. Most of this research is motivated by the claim that PM is critical for maintaining functional independence; yet, there is a dearth of empirical evidence to back up the claims. Thus, the present study tested whether PM predicts functional independence in older adults using validated behavioral performance measures for both PM and functional independence. METHODS: Fifty-eight healthy older adults performed a computerized PM paradigm, the Virtual Week task, as well as a timed version of an instrumental activities of daily living (TIADL) task. Furthermore, we assessed vocabulary, processing speed, and self-reported prospective remembering. RESULTS: TIADL scores correlated significantly with performance in the Virtual Week task, vocabulary, and processing speed. Hierarchical linear regressions revealed that vocabulary and Virtual Week performance were significant predictors for TIADL. However, self-reported PM scores did not predict everyday functioning. CONCLUSIONS: The findings indicate that PM is an important cognitive ability for successful and independent everyday life beyond vocabulary. Moreover, the results show a substantial incremental contribution of intact PM performance for the prediction of everyday functioning by using objective PM measures. (JINS, 2018, 24, 640-645).

The relationship between body dysmorphic disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder: A systematic review of direct comparative studies.

OBJECTIVE: Current nosology conceptualises body dysmorphic disorder as being related to obsessive-compulsive disorder, but the direct evidence to support this conceptualisation is mixed. In this systematic review, we aimed to provide an integrated overview of research that has directly compared body dysmorphic disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder. METHOD: The PubMed database was searched for empirical studies which had directly compared body dysmorphic disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder groups across any subject matter. Of 379 records, 31 met inclusion criteria and were reviewed. RESULTS: Evidence of similarities between body dysmorphic disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder was identified for broad illness features, including age of onset, illness course, symptom severity and level of functional impairment, as well as high perfectionism and high fear of negative evaluation. However, insight was clearly worse in body dysmorphic disorder than obsessive-compulsive disorder, and preliminary data also suggested unique visual processing features, impaired facial affect recognition, increased social anxiety severity and overall greater social-affective dysregulation in body dysmorphic disorder relative to obsessive-compulsive disorder. CONCLUSION: Limitations included a restricted number of studies overall, an absence of studies comparing biological parameters (e.g. neuroimaging), and the frequent inclusion of participants with comorbid body dysmorphic disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Risks of interpreting common features as indications of shared underlying mechanisms are explored, and evidence of differences between the disorders are placed in the context of broader research findings. Overall, this review suggests that the current nosological status of body dysmorphic disorder is somewhat tenuous and requires further investigation, with particular focus on dimensional, biological and aetiological elements.

Collaboration and prospective memory: comparing nominal and collaborative group performance in strangers and couples.

To perform prospective memory (PM) tasks in day-to-day life, we often enlist the help of others. Yet the effects of collaboration on PM are largely unknown. Adopting the methodology of the "collaborative recall paradigm", we tested whether stranger dyads (Experiment 1) and intimate couples (Experiment 2) would perform better on a "Virtual Week" task when working together or each working separately. In Experiment 1, we found evidence of collaborative inhibition: collaborating strangers did not perform to their pooled individual potential, although the effect was modulated by PM task difficulty. We also found that the overall collaborative inhibition effect was attributable to both the retrospective and prospective components of PM. In Experiment 2 however, there was no collaborative inhibition: there was no significant difference in performance between couples working together or separately. Our findings suggest potential costs of collaboration to PM. Intimate relationships may reduce the usual costs of collaboration, with implications for intervention training programmes and for populations who most need PM support.

Improving prospective memory performance with future event simulation in traumatic brain injury patients.

OBJECTIVE: Previous studies have shown that traumatic brain injury (TBI) patients have difficulties with prospective memory (PM). Considering that PM is closely linked to independent living it is of primary interest to develop strategies that can improve PM performance in TBI patients. METHOD: This study employed Virtual Week task as a measure of PM, and we included future event simulation to boost PM performance. Study 1 evaluated the efficacy of the strategy and investigated possible practice effects. Twenty-four healthy participants performed Virtual Week in a no strategy condition, and 24 healthy participants performed it in a mixed condition (no strategy - future event simulation). In Study 2, 18 TBI patients completed the mixed condition of Virtual Week and were compared with the 24 healthy controls who undertook the mixed condition of Virtual Week in Study 1. All participants also completed a neuropsychological evaluation to characterize the groups on level of cognitive functioning. RESULTS: Study 1 showed that participants in the future event simulation condition outperformed participants in the no strategy condition, and these results were not attributable to practice effects. Results of Study 2 showed that TBI patients performed PM tasks less accurately than controls, but that future event simulation can substantially reduce TBI-related deficits in PM performance. The future event simulation strategy also improved the controls' PM performance. CONCLUSIONS: These studies showed the value of future event simulation strategy in improving PM performance in healthy participants as well as in TBI patients. PRACTITIONER POINTS: TBI patients performed PM tasks less accurately than controls, confirming prospective memory impairment in these patients. Participants in the future event simulation condition out-performed participants in the no strategy condition. Future event simulation can substantially reduce TBI-related deficits in PM performance. Future event simulation strategy also improved the controls' PM performance.

Stereotype threat and social function in opioid substitution therapy patients.

OBJECTIVES: People with a history of substance abuse are subject to widespread stigmatization. It seems likely that this societal disapproval will result in feelings of stereotype threat, or the belief that one is the target of demeaning stereotypes. If so, stereotype threat has the potential to contribute to functional difficulties including poor social outcomes. METHODS: Eighty drug users on opioid substitution therapy and 84 demographically matched controls completed measures of mental health and social function. The opioid substitution therapy group were additionally asked to complete a measure that focused on their feelings of stereotype threat in relation to their drug use history. Bivariate correlations and hierarchical regression analyses were conducted to establish the magnitude and specificity of the relationship between stereotype threat and social functioning. RESULTS: Relative to controls, the opioid substitution therapy group reported higher levels of negative affect and schizotypy, and poorer social functioning, with all three of these indices significantly correlated with their feelings of stereotype threat. The results also showed that stereotype threat contributed significant unique variance to social functioning in the opioid substitution therapy group, even after taking into account other background, clinical, and mental health variables. CONCLUSIONS: Social functioning is an important aspect of recovery, yet these data indicate that people with a history of drug abuse who believe they are the target of stereotypical attitudes have poorer social functioning. This relationship holds after controlling for the impact of other variables on social functioning, including mental health. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed. PRACTITIONER POINTS: Concerns about being stereotyped can shape the social experiences of opioid substitution therapy patients. Opioid substitution therapy patients who feel negatively stereotyped experience greater social function deficits, and this relationship emerges after controlling for important clinical and mental health variables. Understanding the relationship between feeling stereotyped and social function may assist practitioners in their treatment. The study is cross-sectional, and thus, experimental or longitudinal research is required to determine the causal direction between stereotype threat and social function.

Virtual Week: Translation and adaptation for the Italian population.

The present study adapted a computerised version of Virtual Week, a laboratory measure of prospective memory designed to simulate the kinds of prospective memory tasks encountered in daily life. In particular, this study aimed to translate and adapt Virtual Week for an Italian population. We collected data from 198 subjects that were divided into five groups based on age: young-young adults (20-29 years, n = 47), young adults (30-45 years, n = 32), middle-age adults (46-59 years, n = 32), young-old adults (60-69 years, n = 41), and old-old adults (70 years plus, n = 39). Results showed that PM performance was best in younger adults, relatively stable over middle adulthood and then decreased with age, with older adults performing the least accurately, in particular for the time-based condition. Results also demonstrated good reliability estimates across a range of ages and task types. Thus, the adaptation of Virtual Week into Italian appears to be a reliable measure of prospective memory for the Italian population.

Prospective memory while driving: comparison of time- and event-based intentions.

Prospective memories can divert attentional resources from ongoing activities. However, it is unclear whether these effects and the theoretical accounts that seek to explain them will generalise to a complex real-world task such as driving. Twenty-four participants drove two simulated routes while maintaining a fixed headway with a lead vehicle. Drivers were given either event-based (e.g. arriving at a filling station) or time-based errands (e.g. on-board clock shows 3:30). In contrast to the predominant view in the literature which suggests time-based tasks are more demanding, drivers given event-based errands showed greater difficulty in mirroring lead vehicle speed changes compared to the time-based group. Results suggest that common everyday secondary tasks, such as scouting the roadside for a bank, may have a detrimental impact on driving performance. The additional finding that this cost was only evident with the event-based task highlights a potential area of both theoretical and practical interest. Practitioner Summary: Drivers were given either time- or event-based errands whilst engaged in a simulated drive. We examined the effect of errands on an ongoing vehicle follow task. In contrast to previous non-driving studies, event-based errands are more disruptive. Common everyday errands may have a detrimental impact on driving performance.

Episodic foresight and schizophrenia.

OBJECTIVE: People with schizophrenia have difficulty engaging in specific future-directed thoughts and behaviours, such as generating phenomenological characteristics of future events (a component of episodic foresight), and executing directed preparatory behaviours (a component of prospective memory). However, it remains unclear whether they also exhibit difficulties using episodic foresight to appropriately guide future-directed behaviours. METHOD: People with schizophrenia and non-clinical controls were administered a behavioural measure that met strict criteria for assessing episodic foresight. In keeping with our focus on the functional application of foresight, this measure required participants to identify a problem, self-generate a resolution, and execute the appropriate future-directed intention. RESULTS: Relative to controls, people with schizophrenia were less likely to spontaneously acquire items that would later allow a problem to be solved, and were also less likely to subsequently use these items to solve the problems. There was no interaction between group and task, indicating that these two components of foresight were disrupted to an equivalent degree. In the clinical (but not the control) group, item acquisition and item use were correlated with general cognitive capacity. No significant associations with clinical variables emerged. CONCLUSION: The capacity to apply episodic foresight in a functionally adaptive way is disrupted in schizophrenia and may at least partially reflect broader cognitive dysfunction. Future work is now needed to clarify the implications of these difficulties in everyday life, as well as how these difficulties might be remediated. PRACTITIONER POINTS: People with schizophrenia have known difficulties with episodic foresight, and it now appears that those difficulties extend to the performance of foresightful preparatory behaviours. Because preparatory behaviours are central to routine and adaptive planning, difficulties with episodic foresight may contribute to or be a result of some of the functional difficulties experienced by people with schizophrenia. Further research is needed to determine whether interventions might be developed for people with reduced episodic foresight. Interventions may include the use of remedial tools that support and encourage the performance of foresightful behaviour, or cognitive training programs that actively improve the ability and propensity to exercise foresight independently.

Deconstructing the nature of episodic foresight deficits associated with chronic opiate use.

OBJECTIVES: Episodic foresight refers to the capacity to mentally travel forward in time and has been linked to a wide variety of important functional behaviours. Evidence has recently emerged that chronic opiate use is associated with deficits in this critical capacity and that these difficulties are not simply a secondary consequence of broader cognitive dysfunction. The current study aimed to better understand the circumstances in which chronic opiate users might be expected to have problems with episodic foresight, by addressing whether deficits reflect compromised scene construction, self-projection, or narrative ability. METHODS: Thirty-five chronic opiate users and 35 demographically matched controls completed an imagination task in which they were instructed to imagine and provide descriptions of an atemporal event, a plausible, self-relevant future event, as well as complete a narrative task. These three imagination conditions systematically varied in their demands on scene construction, self-projection, and narrative ability. RESULTS: Consistent with prior literature, chronic opiate users exhibited reduced capacity for episodic foresight relative to controls. However, this study was the first to show that these difficulties were independent of capacity for scene construction and narration. Instead, a specific impairment in self-projection into the future appears to contribute to the problems with episodic foresight seen in this clinical group. CONCLUSIONS: Deficits in self-projection into the future may have important implications in therapeutic environments given that many relapse prevention strategies rely heavily on the ability to project oneself into an unfamiliar future, free of problem substance use. PRACTITIONER POINTS: A reduced capacity for episodic foresight highlights the importance of refining current relapse prevention protocols that place significant demands for mental time travel into the future. Psychosocial treatments should focus on the attainment of more immediate or short-term goals. It is difficult to delineate the effects of specific substances given long-standing drug use history common to chronic opiate users. Conclusions relating to neurological functioning are speculative given the absence of neuroimaging data.

Age-related similarities and differences in first impressions of trustworthiness.

Trust is a particularly under-studied aspect of social relationships in older age. In the current study, young (n = 35) and older adults (n = 35) completed a series of one-shot social economic trust games in which they invested real money with trustees. There were potential gains with each investment and also a risk of losing everything if the trustee was untrustworthy. The reputation and facial appearance of each trustee were manipulated to make them appear more or less trustworthy. Results revealed that young and older adults invest more money with trustees whose facial appearance and reputation indicate that they are trustworthy rather than untrustworthy. However, older adults were more likely than young to invest with trustees who had a reputation for being untrustworthy. We discuss whether age-related differences in responding to negative information may account for an age-related increase in trust, particularly when trusting someone with a reputation for being uncooperative.

Prospective memory performance in traumatic brain injury patients: a study of implementation intentions.

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) patients often present with prospective memory (PM) dysfunction. Forgetting to complete tasks may result in a loss of independence, limited employment prospects and anxiety, therefore, it is important to develop programs to improve PM performance in TBI patients. A strategy which may improve PM performance is implementation intentions. It involves making explicit plans specifying when, where and how one will perform a task in the future. In the present study, a group of 36 TBI patients and a group of 34 controls performed Virtual Week using either implementation intentions or no strategy. The results showed that the PM performance of TBI patients was less accurate than controls, in particular when the PM cue was time-based. No effect of implementation intentions was observed for TBI patients, however, controls improved their PM performance when the task was time-based. The findings suggest that strategies to improve PM in this clinical group are likely to be more complex than those that benefit healthy adults and may involve targeting phases of the PM process other than, or in addition to, the intention formation phase.

Prospective memory impairment in chronic heart failure.

Although cognitive deficits are common in patients with chronic heart failure (CHF), no study to date has investigated whether these deficits extend to the capacity to execute delayed intentions (prospective memory, PM). This is a surprising omission given the critical role PM plays in correctly implementing many important CHF self-care behaviors. The present study aimed to provide the first empirical assessment of PM function in people with CHF. The key dependent measure was a laboratory measure of PM that closely simulates PM tasks in daily life - Virtual Week. A group comparison design was used, with 30 CHF patients compared to 30 demographically matched controls. Background measures assessing executive functions, working memory, and verbal memory were also administered. The CHF group exhibited significant PM impairment, with difficulties generalizing across different types of PM tasks (event, time, regular, irregular). The CHF group also had moderate deficits on several of the background cognitive measures. Given the level of impairment remained consistent even on tasks that imposed minimal demands on memory for task content, CHF-related difficulties most likely reflects problems with the prospective component. However, exploratory analyses suggest that difficulties with retrospective memory and global cognition (but not executive control), also contribute to the PM difficulties seen in this group. The implications of these data are discussed, and in particular, it is argued that problems with PM may help explain why patient engagement in CHF self-care behaviors is often poor.

How valid are subjective ratings of prospective memory in mild cognitive impairment and early dementia?

BACKGROUND: Prospective memory refers to memory for future intentions and is a critical predictor of functional capacity in late adulthood. For many other cognitive abilities, self- and informant-rated methods of assessment are routinely used to guide clinical decision-making. However, little is known about the validity (and consequently the clinical utility) of subjective reports of prospective memory difficulties. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to compare clinical [mild cognitive impairment (MCI), dementia] and nonclinical older adults (healthy controls) on self- and informant-rated versions of prospective and retrospective memory function, as well as objective measures of prospective memory. Critical here was not only the assessment of between-group differences, but also whether these different methods of assessing memory function would show appropriate convergent and discriminant validity. METHODS: A total of 138 participants aged between 64 and 92 years, diagnosed with dementia (n=37), MCI (n=48) or no impairment (n=53), were asked to complete self- and informant-rated versions of the Prospective and Retrospective Memory Questionnaire (PRMQ). Participants also completed behavioural measures of global cognitive function [the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE)], as well as a behavioural measure of prospective memory (Virtual Week). RESULTS: Self-reported impairments were equivalent across the three groups, and informant reports of impairment, while higher for those with dementia, did not distinguish MCI from controls. For the combined sample and for all three groups separately, both self- and informant reports of prospective memory showed poor convergent validity, at best correlating only weakly with Virtual Week. Self-reported prospective memory was correlated with informant report only in the dementia group, not in the control or MCI groups. Convergent and discriminant validity were poor, with self- and informant-rated prospective memory more strongly related to self- and informant-rated retrospective memory than to scores on Virtual Week. CONCLUSION: These data indicate that self-report and informant report may neither accurately measure prospective memory of older people, nor be sensitive to objective prospective memory difficulties in people with MCI and dementia. These data have potentially important implications for clinical practice.