The development of prospective memory in early childhood: Contributions of retrospective memory and executive control processes

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This program of research examines how children develop the ability to remember to carry out their intentions, known as prospective memory. This is a critical cognitive ability that allows children to function independently from their parents and caregivers. Examples of prospective memory tasks typical in children's everyday life include remembering to return a homework assignment to a teacher or remembering to wear a bicycle helmet before taking a bike ride. Interestingly, children often forget to carry out their intentions despite being able to remember and report what it was they were supposed to do. This ability has important implications for many areas of children's development including their academic and social functioning as well as their safety and well-being.A typical laboratory prospective memory task involves: (1) children being assigned a prospective intention, (2) the introduction of a delay interval in which children complete a distractor activity, (3) an ongoing task that follows the delay interval, and (4) several cues that appear in the ongoing task that signal that the child should complete the prospective intention. At the end of the study, children are asked to confirm that they remember the task instructions in order to eliminate the possibility that children simply forgot what they were supposed to do.The current research will examine the contributions of retrospective memory (remembering the content of the prospective intention) and executive processes (involved in detecting the cue and carrying out the intention) to prospective memory performance during early childhood. Three projects will examine the relation between prospective memory and retrospective memory across early childhood, rule out the possibility that prospective memory failures are due to momentary lapses in retrospective memory, and examine factors that might reduce executive demands to promote successful prospective memory. Taken together, this research will contribute to a better understanding of whether executive processes such as cue monitoring contribute to the development of prospective memory and what the relative contribution of retrospective memory is to prospective memory development.This research will test a developmental model of prospective memory (Mahy, Moses, & Kliegel, 2014) that asserts that although retrospective memory for simple intentions must be in place before a children demonstrate successful prospective memory, executive processes such as monitoring for the prospective memory cue drive the development of prospective memory during childhood. The findings will establish the conditions under which children's prospective memory is successful and conditions under which it fails. More broadly, it will contribute to our understanding of children's memory development, especially memory for carrying out future intentions.