title: The cognitive processes underlying event-based prospective memory in school-age children and young adults: a formal model-based study.
abstract: Fifty children 7 years of age (29 girls, 21 boys), 53 children 10 years of age (29 girls, 24 boys), and 36 young adults (19 women, 17 men) performed a computerized event-based prospective memory task. All 3 groups differed significantly in prospective memory performance, with adults showing the best performance and with 7-year-olds showing the poorest performance. We used a formal multinomial process tree model of event-based prospective memory to decompose age differences in cognitive processes that jointly contribute to prospective memory performance. The formal modeling results demonstrate that adults differed significantly from the 7-year-olds and the 10-year-olds on both the prospective component and the retrospective component of the task. The 7-year-olds and the 10-year-olds differed only in the ability to recognize prospective memory target events. The prospective memory task imposed a cost to ongoing activities in all 3 age groups.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, The University of Texas at San Antonio, One UTSA Circle, San Antonio, TX 78249, USA. rebekah.smith@utsa.edu
authors.forename: Rebekah E
authors.initials: RE
authors.lastname: Smith
authors.forename: Ute J
authors.initials: UJ
authors.lastname: Bayen
authors.forename: Claudia
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Martin
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D001245:Association Learning / Q000502:physiology; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D002648:Child; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory / Q000502:physiology*; D008960:Models, Psychological; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D013997:Time Factors; D055815:Young Adult