Reminders eliminate age-related declines in prospective memory

Abstract

Prospective memory (PM)-the process of establishing intentions for future action and remembering to fulfill these intentions at the appropriate time-is necessary for many instrumental activities of daily living and for maintaining functional independence with increased age. Offloading PM demands onto the environment, such as setting a reminder alarm to take medication, offers an easy and effective way to mitigate age-related PM declines. However, a lack of basic knowledge about the cognitive and metacognitive processes that drive offloading decisions presents barriers to successful implementation. The present study addresses these issues by examining age differences in PM for offloaded (i.e., with reminders) and nonoffloaded (i.e., without reminders) intentions under low and high memory demands. With highly specific intentions that can be retrieved via bottom-up processes (Experiment 1), there were no age differences in PM without reminders, and younger and older adults equally benefitted from reminders under high memory load. With nonspecific intentions that require top-down attention for retrieval (Experiment 2), older adults had worse PM under high load without reminders. Critically, this age difference was eliminated with the use of reminders, likely due to increased reminder checking for older adults under high load. These findings suggest that offloading can circumvent cognitive capacity limitations and minimize computational effort to improve intention fulfillment in older adults. The theoretical and applied ramifications of these findings are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Figure 1. Example of Prospective Memory Targets and Reminders in Experiments 1 and 2

Note. Within each grid, squares on the left and right for each experiment represent the appearance of the PM task for the reminder and no-reminder blocks, respectively. The word in the middle of the visual depiction of the computer screen (i.e., “peach”) represents a PM target trial. The words at the top of the screen represent reminders (reminder blocks) or distractors (no-reminder blocks). Distractors were presented in the no-reminder blocks to match for perceptual characteristics of the reminders. Specific targets were used in Experiment 1, meaning that the targets and reminders were identical. Nonspecific targets were used in Experiment 2, meaning the reminders were categories and the targets were category exemplars. In Experiments 1 and 2, the top and bottom squares represent the task appearance for the low and high load blocks, respectively. PM = prospective memory; Exp.1 = Experiment 1; Exp.2 = Experiment 2.

Figure 2. Primary Results for Experiment 1

Note. The results show target detection (Panel A), reminder checking frequency (Panel B), and metacognitive calibration (Panel C) as a function of reminders and load, separately for younger and older adults. Error bars reflect the standard error of the mean. PM = prospective memory. See the online article for the color version of this figure.

Figure 3. Primary Results for Experiment 2

Note. The results show target detection (Panel A), reminder checking frequency (Panel B), and metacognitive calibration (Panel C) as a function of reminders and load, separately for younger and older adults. Error bars reflect the standard error of the mean. PM = prospective memory. See the online article for the color version of this figure.