Investigating prospective memory via eye tracking: No evidence for a monitoring deficit in older adults

Ballhausen, Nicola; Lauffs, Marc M.; Herzog, Michael H.; Kliegel, Matthias · 2019 · OpenAlex-citations

DOI: 10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2019.09.004

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Summary

This study investigates whether age-related deficits in prospective memory (PM), specifically in nonfocal tasks, are caused by reduced strategic monitoring of target cues. Previous research has attributed older adults' poorer performance in nonfocal PM tasks (where the ongoing task does not focus attention on the PM cue) to insufficient monitoring. However, these conclusions relied on indirect measures, such as ongoing task costs, which yield inconsistent results and are confounded by general age-related slowing. To address this, the authors employed eye tracking to directly measure overt monitoring behavior, defined as eye movements toward the PM target location. The experiment involved 30 younger adults (18–29 years) and 31 older adults (62–78 years) who performed a vowel/consonant discrimination task as the ongoing activity. Simultaneously, they had to detect specific target cues (e.g., specific letters or colors) in either the central or peripheral visual field. The design manipulated "focality" across four conditions: focal (target overlaps with ongoing task in location and information), and three levels of nonfocal (target differs in location, information, or both). Because peripheral targets were obscured by visual crowding, participants were forced to make eye movements to the target location to identify them, providing a direct behavioral index of monitoring. Results confirmed that older adults performed significantly worse than younger adults in the nonfocal PM tasks, replicating the known age deficit. However, eye-tracking data revealed no significant differences between age groups in the frequency or duration of fixations on the target locations across any focality condition. Older adults monitored the targets just as frequently as younger adults. Furthermore, when analyzing only trials where participants had successfully monitored the target (i.e., made the requisite eye movement), older adults still exhibited lower PM accuracy than younger adults. This indicates that the failure to monitor was not the cause of the performance deficit. The findings challenge the prevailing assumption that older adults' difficulties with nonfocal prospective memory stem from a lack of strategic monitoring. Instead, the study suggests that the deficit lies in processes occurring after target detection, such as the retrieval of the intention or the execution of the response. By using direct eye-tracking measures, the authors demonstrate that older adults engage in adequate monitoring but fail to translate this monitoring into successful PM performance, highlighting the need to investigate post-monitoring mechanisms in aging research.

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• prospective memory interruptions