Dylan Ellis / Psychology / Faculty Mentor: Hunter Ball
Prospective memory (PM) – the process of establishing intentions for future action and remembering to fulfill these intentions at the appropriate time – is necessary for many instrumental activities of daily living and for maintaining functional independence with increased age. Offloading PM demands onto the environment, such as setting a reminder alarm to take medication, offers an easy and effective way to mitigate age-related PM declines. However, a lack of basic knowledge about the cognitive and metacognitive processes that drive offloading decisions presents barriers to successful implementation. The current study addresses these issues by examining age differences in choosing to set reminders for PM intentions under low and high memory demands. We also use pupil size as an indicator of how effortfully participants learned intentions for which they did or did not set reminders for. Results suggest that older adults may be overconfident in their memory abilities and do not always effectively compensate for their poorer unaided memory ability by setting more reminders. The theoretical and applied ramifications of these findings are discussed.
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