title: The best of both worlds: emotional cues improve prospective memory execution and reduce repetition errors.
abstract: Prospective memory (PM) errors are commonly investigated as failures to execute an intended task (e.g., taking medication), and some studies suggest that emotional PM cues significantly reduce such failures. In Experiment 1, we extended these findings and additionally explored whether improved PM performance with emotional cues comes at the expense of performance on the ongoing task. Our results indicated that both younger and older adults are more likely to respond to emotional than to neutral PM cues, but the emotional cues did not differentially disrupt the performance on the ongoing task for either age group. Because older adults are also prone to mistakenly repeating a completed PM task, in Experiment 2 we further examined whether emotional PM cues increased repetition errors for older adults. Despite equivalent opportunity for repetition errors across cue type, older adults committed significantly fewer repetition errors with emotional than with neutral cues. Thus, these experiments demonstrated that older adults can effectively use emotional cues to help them initiate actions and to minimize repetition errors.
authors.affiliation: a Department of Psychology , College of Charleston , Charleston , SC , USA.
authors.forename: Cynthia P
authors.initials: CP
authors.lastname: May
authors.forename: Michelle
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Manning
authors.forename: Gilles O
authors.initials: GO
authors.lastname: Einstein
authors.forename: Lauren
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Becker
authors.forename: Max
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Owens
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D003463:Cues; D004644:Emotions; D006184:Habits; D006801:Humans; D061212:Memory, Episodic; D008875:Middle Aged; D011597:Psychomotor Performance; D011930:Reaction Time; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: aging; emotion; monitoring; prospective memory; repetition errors