The interplay of intention maintenance and cue monitoring in younger and older adults’ prospective memory

Ballhausen, Nicola; Schnitzspahn, Katharina M.; Horn, Sebastian; Kliegel, Matthias · 2017 · OpenAlex-citations

DOI: 10.3758/s13421-017-0720-5

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Summary

This study investigates the interplay between intention maintenance and cue monitoring during the retention phase of prospective memory (PM), specifically examining how these processes interact in younger and older adults. While previous research has largely treated maintenance (retaining the intention) and monitoring (detecting the cue) as separate factors, this work tests whether they compete for shared attentional resources. The authors hypothesized that high maintenance loads might impair monitoring processes or post-retrieval actions, potentially altering the typical performance advantage seen in focal PM tasks (where cues are relevant to the ongoing task) compared to nonfocal tasks. The experiment employed a 2 × 2 × 2 mixed-factorial design involving 84 younger and 83 older adults. Participants performed a one-back letter category task as the ongoing activity while simultaneously executing a PM task. The study manipulated two key variables: focality (focal vs. nonfocal cues) and maintenance load (low vs. high). In the low-load condition, cue-action pairings were simple and direct (e.g., pressing a key matching the cue). In the high-load condition, pairings were complex and unrelated (e.g., pressing a specific unrelated key for a given cue), requiring greater working memory resources to maintain the intention. Performance was measured via PM hit rates, confusion errors, and ongoing task response times. Results indicated that PM performance and ongoing task response times were significantly affected by maintenance load and age. Younger adults outperformed older adults in PM accuracy, and high maintenance loads reduced PM performance for both groups. Crucially, the study found a significant interaction between maintenance load and focality. In the low-maintenance condition, the typical focality effect emerged: participants performed better on focal tasks than on nonfocal tasks. However, this advantage disappeared under high maintenance load, where performance on focal and nonfocal tasks was comparable. Similarly, ongoing task response time costs showed a focality effect only under low maintenance load. High maintenance loads also increased confusion errors, suggesting difficulties in executing the correct action even when cues were detected. The findings suggest that intention maintenance and cue monitoring compete for similar attentional resources. High maintenance demands appear to deplete the cognitive capacity required for strategic monitoring, thereby eliminating the usual benefit of focal cues. Furthermore, the results imply that maintenance load may impair post-retrieval processes, such as inhibiting the ongoing task and switching to the PM action. These conclusions highlight the importance of considering the retrospective memory demands of intentions when understanding prospective memory failures, particularly in older adults who have more limited cognitive resources. The study demonstrates that the interplay between maintaining an intention and monitoring for its execution is not additive but interactive, with high maintenance loads constraining the effectiveness of cue monitoring strategies.

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• prospective memory interruptions