[McDermott 04]

McDermott K, Knight RG. The effects of aging on a measure of prospective remembering using naturalistic stimuli. Applied Cognitive Psychology. 2004;18(3):349-362. Available at: http://doi.wiley.com/10.1002/acp.977.

• abstract: determine effect of age on noticing and memory search stages of a PM task; use of naturalistic stimuli; older participants had disproportionate reduction in recall of actions relative to cues notices compared to both younger and middle-aged participants; noticing complex and naturalistic visual cues in a shopping environment may rely primarily on automatic memory processes, whereas memory search depends on more strategic and conscious memory processes;

• intro: aimed to construct a measure that would avoid the ceiling effects of many single-item tests of PR;
• familiarity with naturalistic tasks mobilise a high degree of motivation in patients w/ brain injuries and older adults;
• to enhance distracting nature of street scene, participants asked to keep count of number of strollers and bicycles; naturalistic equivalent of ongoing task used in laboratory measures of PM;
• important distinction b/w automatic memory processes relevant to noticing stage and conscious and strategic processing involved in search stage; depending on characteristics of task, likely that noticing may involved both automatic and conscious search processes; evidence that automatic processing is relatively invariant with age, whereas capacity for conscious memory search declines;
• in present study, unfamiliar environment used to minimise participants' opportunity to search actively for relevant cues; retrospective recall of associated action is assumed to require a self-initiated search process that is primarily conscious; possible that some actions are recalled automatically;
• age-related decline in event-based PM has been demonstrated consistently
• Rendell and Craik raised possibility that PM would be unaffected by age on tasks completed under real-life conditions; older participants' performance was superior to that of the younger group; although younger people generally have better PR skills, older people may show superior performance on naturalistic tasks where they are likely to be highly motivated to succeed and have sufficient time available to focus on remembering intentions

• method: participants additionally required to report how many bicycles and strollers seen during video, make cell phone call to make doctor's appt 20 min after video started;
• results: sig. main effect of age, sig. main effect of proportion (cues/response) correct, significant interaction; simple main effects of age with both proportion scores; proportions of cues and tasks remembered did not differ between younger and middle-aged group; older group differed from both other groups on proportion of tasks recalled; older adults had proportionally more difficulty correctly recalling the action to be taken than noticing visual cues for action than did other two groups;
• consistent decline in performance on recalling cue and task for each item across age groups; regardless of nature of item, older individuals less likely to complete instructed action;
• counting bicycles and strollers: group means did not differ significantly;
• time-based recall: sig. group difference; older differed from younger, not from middle-aged;

• discussion: participants disproportionately less able to perform memory search than to notice relevant cue compared to younger and middle-aged groups; recognising a cue but being unable to remember what it means becomes more common in old age;
• very little is known about affect of middle-age PM; performance of this group did not differ from younger group in any significant way; substantial decline in memory processes associated with strategic memory search for recall of actions is not likely to occur until later life;
• failure of older persons on time monitoring tests has been observed in previous studies;
• number of instructions given to participants clearly outside range that anyone would normally attempt to complete in everyday life; previous research shown that recognising cues in environment is relatively easily accomplished;
• one feature of PM task is that it necessitates an interruption to one's activity in order to carry out the intention; without such an ongoing task many PM tests in laboratory settings would be tests of vigilance and few failures of PM would occur; naturalistic delay periods typically filled with natural distractions and internal cognitions;
• previous studies demonstrated age invariance w.r.t. automatic processes in presence of marked deterioration in controlled or strategic processing;
• older persons took longer to notice cues; reduced efficiency in processing significance of instance of a cue; implicates self-initiated retrospective recall as most sig. reason for failure of PM among elderly;
• test items not screened for age-specific content beforehand; differences in content of items are unlikely to have contributed substantially to PM decline among older people;
• higher level processing may also have a role in decline of PM; age does not necessarily diminish ability to perform vigilance tasks, doing so may affect capacity of older participants to complete a concurrent PM task; this may be strategic decision based on their subjective estimation of likelihood of success on memory task or it may be that focusing on monitoring task diminishes attentional capacity to notice cues or recall intentions;

• Jennings J., Jacoby LL. An opposition procedure for detecting age-related deficits in recollection: telling effects of repetition. Psychology and aging. 1997;12(2):352-61. Available at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9189995.

• McDaniel MA, Einstein GO. Strategic and automatic processes in prospective memory retrieval: a multiprocess framework. Applied Cognitive Psychology. 2000;14(7):S127-S144. Available at: http://doi.wiley.com/10.1002/acp.775.

• Ellis J, Kvavilashvili L. Prospective memory in 2000: Past, present, and future directions. Applied Cognitive Psychology. 2000;14(7):S1-S9. Available at: http://doi.wiley.com/10.1002/acp.767.

• Rendell RG, Craik FI. Virtual week and actual week: Age-related differences in prospective memory. Applied Cognitive Psychology. 2000;14(7):S43-S62. Available at: http://doi.wiley.com/10.1002/acp.770.

• Alderman N, Burgess PW, Knight C, Henman C. Ecological validity of a simplified version of the multiple errands shopping test. Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society : JINS. 2003;9(1):31-44. Available at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12570356.