Improving children’s ability to remember intentions: a literature review on strategies to improve prospective memory during childhood

Cottini, Milvia · 2023 · OpenAlex-citations

DOI: 10.1007/s00426-023-01834-8

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Summary

This literature review examines strategies to enhance prospective memory (PM)—the ability to remember and execute intended actions—in children, a cognitive function that does not fully mature until late adolescence. The study addresses the frequent PM failures observed in childhood, which can negatively impact academic performance, social relationships, and safety. The author critically evaluates interventions developed over the past 50 years, assessing their effectiveness from a developmental perspective and analyzing underlying mechanisms such as cognitive resource demands, processing overlaps, and metacognitive control. The review synthesizes empirical findings on internal strategies (encoding modalities and strategies) and external aids (reminders). Internal strategies include varying encoding modalities (verbal, visual, enacted) and employing specific encoding techniques like implementation intentions, episodic future thinking (EFT), and performance predictions. External strategies involve providing visual or verbal reminders. The analysis considers PM task types (event-, time-, and activity-based) and cue characteristics (focal vs. non-focal, specific vs. categorical) to determine which interventions are most effective for different age groups and task demands. Key findings indicate that intervention effectiveness varies significantly by age and task type. Regarding encoding modalities, younger children (ages 7–8) benefit more from visual or object-present encoding, whereas older children (ages 10–11) perform better with enacted encoding. Episodic future thinking and performance predictions significantly improve PM performance in school-aged children, with the latter sometimes inducing attentional monitoring costs. Conversely, implementation intentions showed no significant effect on PM performance in the reviewed studies involving children. External reminders, particularly visual ones, were found to significantly improve PM performance in preschoolers and early school-aged children, often without impairing ongoing task performance. The review highlights that focal PM tasks, which rely on automatic retrieval, show earlier developmental improvements than non-focal or time-based tasks, which require strategic monitoring and executive resources. The significance of this review lies in its comprehensive mapping of PM interventions against developmental trajectories. It underscores that while some strategies effectively support children’s PM, others are less efficient or ineffective during childhood. The findings suggest that interventions should be tailored to the child’s developmental stage and the specific cognitive demands of the PM task. The paper concludes by emphasizing the need for more research on the applicability of these strategies in naturalistic settings and suggests that understanding the interplay between metacognition, executive functions, and PM development is crucial for designing effective support systems for children.

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• prospective memory interruptions