Citation

Einstein GO, Smith RE, McDaniel MA, Shaw P. Psychol. Aging 1997; 12(3): 479-488.

Affiliation

Department of Psychology, Furman University, Greenville, South Carolina 29613, USA. gil.einstein@furman.edu

Copyright

(Copyright © 1997, American Psychological Association)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

9308095

Abstract

A feature of prospective memory tasks is that they tend to be embedded into other background activities. Two experiments examined how the demands of these background activities affect age differences in prospective memory. The first experiment showed that increasing the demands of the background activities (by adding a digit-monitoring task) significantly reduced prospective memory performance. Planned comparisons revealed that age differences in prospective memory were reliable only in the more demanding background condition. The second experiment revealed significant prospective memory declines when the demands were selectively increased at encoding for both younger and older adults. When the demands were selectively increased at retrieval, older adults were particularly affected. The authors propose a model that relies on both automatic retrieval processes and working memory resources to explain prospective memory remembering.

Language: en