Adult Aging and Event-Based Prospective Memory (2008)

Undergraduate: Wei-chun Wang

Faculty Advisor: Kelly Giovanello
Department: Psychology & Neuroscience

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Episodic memory, defined as memory for events and experiences, can be prospective (i.e. remembering to perform an intended action), or retrospective (i.e. remembering a previously encountered event). The present experiment attempted to analyze age related declines in prospective and retrospective memory. One hypothesis, consistent with previous aging studies, was that the prospective memory task would disrupt retrospective memory for items and for associations to the same extent. Alternatively, a second hypothesis was that the disruption or task interference between prospective memory and the ongoing encoding task would lead older adults to perform significantly worse on the later retrospective memory task, especially when that task was associative in nature. Furthermore, older adults are also expected to exhibit worse prospective memory than their younger adult counterparts. Results reinforce conclusions drawn by previous studies in regards to aging differences in both prospective and retrospective memory. Of note, older adults did not exhibit an exaggeration of task interference on associative memory. Future directions in the growing realm of prospective memory research are discussed.