ABSTRACT
The present study investigated the effect of Parkinson's disease (PD) on prospective memory (PM) tasks by varying the emotional content of the PM actions. Twenty-one older adults with PD and 25 healthy older adults took part in the present study. Participants performed three virtual days in the Virtual Week task. On each virtual day, participants performed actions with positive, negative or neutral content. Immediately following each virtual day, participants completed a recognition task to assess their retrospective memory for the various PM tasks. PD patients were less accurate than the control group at both PM accuracy and recognition task accuracy. The effect of emotional valence was also evident, indicating that all participants were more accurate on positive PM tasks than both negative and neutral. This study confirmed PM impairment in PD patients and extended previous research showing how positive emotional stimuli can influence PM performance.
ABSTRACT
The contrasting age-related trends on laboratory and naturalistic prospective memory (PM) studies were investigated with the same participants. In the first two experiments, 380 participants in three age groups (20s, 60s, and 80+) were given a naturalistic PM task of logging the time at four set times for one week. There were six between-subjects regimens that varied the complexity of the time schedule, and the opportunity to use conjunction cues and external aids. The 60s and 80+ age groups did not differ and both older adult age groups were consistently superior to the young adults on all regimens. In Experiment 3, the same participants showed a significant age-related decline on retrospective memory tasks, and on event-based and time-based laboratory PM tasks embedded within the retrospective memory tasks. The study confirmed the paradoxical age-related trends on laboratory and naturalistic PM tasks.
