Abstract
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.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 536-553 |
Number of pages | 18 |
Journal | Child Neuropsychology |
Volume | 23 |
Issue number | 5 |
Early online date | 28 Mar 2016 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2017 |
Bibliographical note
FundingThis work was supported by the German Research Foundation [DFG grants SFB 940/1].
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Lia Kvavilashvili for her helpful comments on this study during the International Conference on Prospective Memory (ICPM4) in Naples, Italy, 2014. We thank Daniel P. Sheppard for proofreading the manuscript.
Keywords
- Adolescence
- Executive functions
- Future thinking
- Imagery
- Prospective memory