title: Future thinking instructions improve prospective memory performance in adolescents.
abstract: Studies on prospective memory (PM) development in adolescents point to age-related increases through to adulthood. The goal of the present study was to examine whether instructing adolescents to engage in an episodic prospection of themselves executing future actions (i.e., future thinking) when forming an intention would improve their PM performance and reduce age-related differences. Further, we set out to explore whether future thinking instructions result in stronger memory traces and/or stronger cue-context associations by evaluating retrospective memory for the PM cues after task completion and monitoring costs during PM task processing. Adolescents and young adults were allocated to either the future thinking, repeated-encoding or standard condition. As expected, adolescents had fewer correct PM responses than young adults. Across age groups, PM performance in the standard condition was lower than in the other encoding conditions. Importantly, the results indicate a significant interaction of age by encoding condition. While adolescents benefited most from future thinking instructions, young adults performed best in the repeated-encoding condition. The results also indicate that the beneficial effects of future thinking may result from deeper intention-encoding through the simulation of future task performance.
authors.affiliation: a Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour , Radboud University Nijmegen , Nijmegen , The Netherlands.|b Department of Psychology , Technische Universität Dresden , Dresden , Germany.
authors.forename: Mareike
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Altgassen
authors.affiliation: b Department of Psychology , Technische Universität Dresden , Dresden , Germany.
authors.forename: Anett
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Kretschmer
authors.affiliation: c School of Psychology , University of Aberdeen , Aberdeen , UK.
authors.forename: Katharina Marlene
authors.initials: KM
authors.lastname: Schnitzspahn
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D056344:Executive Function / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D061212:Memory, Episodic; D012189:Retrospective Studies; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis; D013850:Thinking / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Adolescence; Executive functions; Future thinking; Imagery; Prospective memory