Assessment of prospective memory: A review of data from laboratory-based paradigms and ecologically valid tasks

Abstract

The present chapter aims to review the assessment of prospective memory (PM) inhealthy subjects and clinical populations. In particular, the purposes of this chapter arethree-fold: (1) To evaluate the pros and cons of different types of PM tasks: event-based,time-based and activity-based, (2) To discuss the issue of ecological validity in clinicalpractice, (3) To evaluate the effect sizes of PM deficits in patients with neurologicaldisorders. Moreover, we also illustrate the potential aging effect on PM using bothexperimental-based and ecologically valid paradigms. The present findings provide us acomprehensive view about aging effect by comparing three age groups: young, young oldand older old. Three different types of laboratory-based PM showed different agingpatterns, event-based PM tasks show a general decline pattern while aging effect of timebasedPM only obvious when comparing the young and the young old. Activity-basedPM did not show any aging effect, which implies different aging process of three types ofPM. However, both executive function and retrospective memory failed to show therelationship with PM with one exception-one high cognitive demanding ecologicalvalid time-based PM (open-and-close door in hotel test), was found consistent significantcorrelations with executive function, suggesting that executive function is not needed inPM unless PM performance is difficult or competing with other tasks for cognitive resources. © 2007 by Nova Science Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved.