Age differences in prospective memory : is there more to be explained by reminders and metacognition? : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Psychology at Massey University, Albany, New Zealand
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2021
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Massey University
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The purpose of the current research was to examine if older adults perform better than younger adults at prospective memory (PM) tasks in a naturalistic environment due to better use of reminders. Specifically, it was predicted that (in line with previous research) older adults would outperform younger adults on the naturalistic PM task. It was also predicted that older adults would support their prospective remembering more effectively than younger adults through superior metacognitive awareness. Beyond confirming previous findings, this study sought to create and validate new methods for investigating the relationship between reminder use and PM. To examine reminder use and PM, a web-based app containing an A and a B button was given to 69 participants (N = 36 younger adults, N= 33 older adults) across Australia and New Zealand to press 21 times in a week with a required four-hour wait between presses. Upon completing the task, two surveys then comprehensively examined how participants completed the task and how participants use reminders in everyday life outside of the task. None of the original hypotheses were supported. However, in line with previous findings, the results from this study indicated that even when older adults used fewer reminders on average than younger adults (p < .05), there was still no significant age-related declines in PM performance (p > .05). An intriguing finding came through investigating metacognitive awareness. The results implied that older adults who ‘actively manage’ their remembering do much better with PM tasks (22.5% of PM performance variance explained by metacognitive awareness). However, the same effect is absent in younger adults (<1% variance explained). The current study showed that more sophisticated and considered methods for investigating reminder use in PM is in order and discusses how these might be implemented in future research.