Future thinking instructions improve prospective memory performance in adolescents.

Studies on prospective memory (PM) development in adolescents point to age-related increases through to adulthood. The goal of the present study was to examine whether instructing adolescents to engage in an episodic prospection of themselves executing future actions (i.e., future thinking) when forming an intention would improve their PM performance and reduce age-related differences. Further, we set out to explore whether future thinking instructions result in stronger memory traces and/or stronger cue-context associations by evaluating retrospective memory for the PM cues after task completion and monitoring costs during PM task processing. Adolescents and young adults were allocated to either the future thinking, repeated-encoding or standard condition. As expected, adolescents had fewer correct PM responses than young adults. Across age groups, PM performance in the standard condition was lower than in the other encoding conditions. Importantly, the results indicate a significant interaction of age by encoding condition. While adolescents benefited most from future thinking instructions, young adults performed best in the repeated-encoding condition. The results also indicate that the beneficial effects of future thinking may result from deeper intention-encoding through the simulation of future task performance.

Fluid mechanics moderate the effect of implementation intentions on a health prospective memory task in older adults.

The aim of the present study was to test if a cognitive strategy improves older adults' prospective memory performance in a naturalistic health task. Moreover, it was tested if a possible strategy effect is moderated by individual differences. Therefore, a group of older adults was asked to perform a task taken from the medication adherence literature (i.e., blood pressure monitoring). Half of them were asked to form implementation intentions. Additionally, crystallized pragmatics and fluid mechanics, conscientiousness, self-efficacy, and lifestyle factors were assessed as possible moderators. Results showed a strong positive strategy effect on prospective memory. Moreover, the effect was qualified by a significant interaction and only emerged for participants with low levels in fluid mechanics. No other moderator showed an effect. In conclusion, an enhancing effect of implementation intentions on prospective memory seems to be dependent on individual differences in cognitive capacity and less related to key motivational or personality variables.

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

This study investigated age effects in prospective memory performance within older adults. The first aim was to explore this issue by examining event- and time-based prospective memory performance in two age groups: young-old (60-75 years) and old-old adults (76-90 years). Moreover, this study for the first time investigated whether forming implementation intentions could be used to improve prospective memory in young-old and old-old adults. Results showed a general effect of age in prospective memory performance for both task types. In addition, no general effect of implementation intentions in prospective memory performance across both task types and age groups was found. However, testing implementation intention effects separately for both age groups revealed that the formation of implementation intentions enhanced prospective memory only for the young-old adults, but did not substantially affect the performance in the time-based task and even impaired it in the event-based task for the old-old adults. Findings indicate that the formation of implementation intentions might be a powerful memory strategy for young-old adults, but not for the very old.