Development of time-based prospective memory across childhood: Age trajectories and possible mechanisms
Final Report Abstract
The general aim of the present project was to contribute to a deeper understanding of the development of prospective memory (PM) in childhood.PM is the ability to remember and to execute intentions after a certain delay such as remembering to take medication after breakfast or remembering to take back a signed letter to school at the next morning. PM has been suggested to play a key role in independent daily functioning with many memory failures in everyday life being prospective in nature rather than retrospective. In two correlational pilot studies and three largescale experimental main studies, the present project focused on two main research questions: First, on a descriptive level, the developmental course of PM from late preschool-age into early adolescence was investigated: How does PM develop between late pre-school (5 years) and beginning of secondary school age years (13 years)? Second, on an explanatory level, executive functions were examined as mechanisms possibly driving the age-related growth in PM: Why does PM develop in this age range? With regard to the first descriptive research question, all studies found continuous developmental growth from late preschool-age to early adolescence. Interestingly, in the present project, children as young as 5-years-old could perform the time-based PM task suggesting that even in the youngest sample children had some basic abilities to perform future-oriented thinking and action control to carry out an intention at a particular point in time. What is also remarkable is the continuous, mostly linear trajectory of the developmental growth. This is in contrast to other cognitive domains in child development, especially in memory research, where plateau functions are often reported at beginning or within the primary school age range. Conceptually, this is in line with our assumption that PM may not be a mostly memory-based cognitive function but (at least also) relying on cognitive processes showing a more long-lasting development such as executive control. To disentangle some of the developmental mechanisms was the aim of the second research question. Here, results revealed an interesting and complex pattern with respect to the role of working memory updating, inhibition and cognitive flexibility in PM development: The observed (general) association between PM performance and all three facets of executive control in childhood is in accordance with conceptual models suggesting PM to be a mixture of memory and executive control processes and confirming this for the first time across all executive sub-facets for the children age range. Moreover, the present work adds several important issues. First, the effect of executive functioning on PM performance (accuracy) directly interacted with age only for working memory updating (main study 1), but not for inhibition (main study 2) or flexibility (main study 3). This is remarkable as it is in contrast to data from the adult literature where we recently found that aging effects in PM were mediated by task switching and inhibition but not working memory updating. It is however in line with the results from our correlational pilot study where only working memory but not inhibition mediated the effect. This strongly suggests different developmental mechanisms being associated with the rise and fall of PM across the lifespan and will have to be explored in further lifespan studies. Second, the present studies clearly suggest that next to PM accuracy, time monitoring, particularly the monitoring pattern (vs. the monitoring frequency alone), is one sub-process of PM that is particularly sensitive to developmental processes and that monitoring behavior may mediate the impact of both executive control factors on prospective remembering. With growing age a qualitative shift seems to take place from simple, non-strategic monitoring behaviour relying on external indicators of time and consuming general attentional resources to more strategic monitoring based on internal temporal models that specifically relies on working memory updating and inhibitory control resources and thereby enhances the delayed execution of intended actions. This suggests a link to another group of possible developmental mechanisms of PM development, namely metacognitive strategies which have so far been mostly ignored in PM research but have been shown to be important in other areas of memory development. Again, future work building up on this project will have to explore this issue.
Publications
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(2011). Time-based prospective memory in schoolchildren - The role of self-initiation and strategic time-monitoring. Journal of Psychology, 219, 92-99
Voigt, B., Aberle, I., Schönfeld, J., & Kliegel, M.
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(2011, January). Time-based Prospective Memory in Primary-School-Children: Contributions of Self-Initiated Memory Retrieval and Time-Monitoring Strategies. Budapest CEU Conference on Cognitive Development (BCCCD), Budapest (Hungary)
Voigt, B., Aberle, I., Schoenfeldt, J., & Kliegel, M.
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(2011, July/August). Time-based Prospective Memory in Young Children: The Role of Executive Control and Time-Monitoring Strategies. 5th International Conference on Memory, York (UK)
Voigt, B., Kretschmer A., Pfeiffer, K., Schenk, S. & Kliegel, M.
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(2011, June). Automatic and controlled processes in prospective memory development. 41st Annual Meeting of the Jean Piaget Society, Berkeley, California, USA
Kliegel, M. (2011, June). Automatic and controlled processes in prospective memory development. Presented
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(2013). The development of prospective memory in young schoolchildren: The impact of ongoing task absorption, cue salience, and cue centrality. The Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 116, 792-810
Kliegel, M., Mahy, C.E.V., Voigt, B., Henry, J.D. Rendell, P.G., & Aberle, I.
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(2013). Time-based Prospective Memory in Young Children: Exploring Executive Functions as a Developmental Mechanism. Child Neuropsychology. [2013 Oct 10. Epub ahead of print]
Kretschmer, A., Voigt, B., Friedrich, S., Pfeiffer, K., & Kliegel, M.
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(2013, April). Prospective memory development: The role of executive control and memory processes. Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Seattle, Washington, USA
Kliegel, M. & Voigt, B.
