From the lab to the classroom: Improving children's prospective memory in a natural setting.

BACKGROUND: Laboratory-based studies have shown that children's ability to remember intentions (i.e., prospective memory; PM) can be improved by asking them to imagine performing the PM task beforehand (i.e., episodic future thinking; EFT) or to predict their PM performance. Moreover, combining the two strategies resulted in an additional improvement in children's PM performance. However, the effectiveness of these encoding strategies on real-life PM tasks is still unknown. AIMS: The aim of the present study was to evaluate the effect of EFT instructions, performance predictions, and of their combination on children's PM in a natural setting, namely in the classroom. SAMPLE: Twelve classes composed by a total of 121 children (53% females) aged between seven and 9 years participated to the study. METHODS: As a PM task, children were asked by their teachers to deliver a letter to their parents and to bring it back to school the next day. Children were divided into four groups: control, prediction, EFT, and the EFT + prediction group. Parent reports on children's everyday prospective and retrospective memory failures were also collected. RESULTS: Results showed that encoding strategies were effective in enhancing children's PM performance. However, differences compared to previous laboratory-based findings emerged since predicting PM performance resulted to be most effective in enhancing real-life PM performance. Moreover, parent reports were related to children's PM performance. CONCLUSIONS: These novel findings highlight the importance of studying PM interventions in natural settings in order to increase their ecological validity and inform educational practices.

Improving children's ability to remember intentions: a literature review on strategies to improve prospective memory during childhood.

Children often fail to remember executing intentions because prospective memory (PM) does not completely develop until late adolescence or young adulthood. PM failures are often observed in children and can have negative consequences on their everyday lives. Thus, in the last 50 years, various strategies to support children's PM have been designed and evaluated, such as prompting children to use different encoding modalities, such as verbal, visual, and enacted modalities, or encoding strategies, such as implementation intentions, episodic future thinking (EFT), and performance predictions, as well as providing children with verbal and visual reminders. However, not all these interventions have shown to efficiently enhance PM performance during childhood. The present literature review is aimed at summarizing these interventions and critically examining their effectiveness from a developmental perspective and by considering underlying mechanisms. The type of PM task (event-, time-, and activity-based), cognitive resource demands, and processing overlaps are also considered. Finally, directions for future research and possible applications in everyday life will be discussed.

After-effects of responding to activated and deactivated prospective memory target events differ depending on processing overlaps.

Responding to a prospective memory task in the course of an ongoing activity requires switching tasks, which typically comes at a cost in performing the ongoing activity. Similarly, when the prospective memory task is deactivated, a cost can occur when previously relevant prospective memory targets appear in the course of the ongoing activity. In three experiments with undergraduate student participants (N = 226), in which cue focality was manipulated as a function of processing overlaps, we investigated the after-effects of activated and deactivated prospective memory target events. We predicted that lower focality results in stronger after-effects when the prospective memory task is activated but in weaker after-effects when the prospective memory task is deactivated. In contrast, we predicted that higher focality results in weaker after-effects when the prospective memory task is activated but in stronger after-effects when the prospective memory task is deactivated. For activated prospective memory, the pattern of results conformed to the expectations. For deactivated prospective memory, after-effects occurred only under high process overlap situations in a zero-target condition, in which participants were instructed for the prospective memory task, but never had the opportunity to perform it, indicating the special representational status of uncompleted intentions. We discuss these findings within the process overlap framework, which allows more fine-grained distinctions than the focal versus nonfocal dichotomy. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

"Teacher, forgive me, I forgot to do it!" The impact of children's prospective memory on teachers' evaluation of academic performance.

BACKGROUND: According to Munsat (1965, The concept of memory. University of Michigan), a person who makes frequent prospective memory (PM) errors is considered as having a flawed character rather than a bad memory. Given that PM completes its development only in young adulthood, this bias might occur not only within social relationships but also in school. However, little is known about the impact of this bias on academic performance. AIMS: This study aimed to evaluate the impact of children's PM on teacher's evaluations of their academic performance (i.e., grades) and social skills. SAMPLE: A total of 158 eight- and twelve-year-old children (48% females) participated in this study. METHODS: A working memory (WM) updating task was used as ongoing task (OT), in which the PM task was embedded and required participants to respond whenever certain pictures appeared. Children's social skills were measured through teacher ratings, whereas grades were collected as indicators of teachers' assessment of academic performance. Children's WM span and inhibitory control were also assessed. RESULTS: Results showed that 8- and 12-year-old children's academic performance was predicted by both PM performance and teachers' evaluations of social skills. However, social skills evaluations were not predicted by PM performance. WM span was related to grades in 8 year olds, while inhibitory control was related to PM performance in 12 year olds. CONCLUSIONS: These outcomes highlight that children's grades are not explained only by academic performance itself but also by other personal skills. Awareness of the biases which can occur when evaluating children's academic performance can help teachers to be more objective in their assessment.

Improving prospective memory in school-aged children: Effects of future thinking and performance predictions.

Recently, event-based prospective memory (PM) performance of children has been shown to benefit from different encoding strategies such as imagining the execution of a future PM task (i.e., future thinking) and making performance predictions (i.e., metacognitive monitoring). This study aimed to investigate whether and how these two encoding strategies affect PM performance alone and in combination. For this purpose, 127 children aged 8-11 years were assigned to four encoding conditions: (a) standard, (b) performance predictions, (c) future thinking, and (d) future thinking + performance predictions. The ongoing task performance costs (i.e., attentional monitoring), working memory (WM) span, and metacognitive monitoring judgments, such as task difficulty expectations, performance postdictions, confidence judgments, and strategy use, were also evaluated among participants. The results show that combining future thinking instructions with performance predictions considerably improved children's PM performance without incurring additional attentional monitoring costs. Moreover, whereas children generally tended to overestimate their PM performance, more realistic lower-performance predictions were related to higher PM scores for children in the combined condition. Finally, age, WM, and strategy use significantly predicted PM performance independent of the encoding condition. This study is the first to demonstrate that combining future thinking instructions with performance predictions enhances children's PM performance compared with each encoding strategy alone. Moreover, this work is the first to show that by simply imagining the execution of a PM task, children's prediction accuracy can be improved, which is significantly related to the PM performance advantage.

Performance predictions and postdictions in prospective memory of school-aged children.

Prospective memory (PM) undergoes important developmental changes during the primary school years, particularly around 7 and 8 years of age. Recent studies have suggested that, as well as executive functions (EFs), PM development also benefits from age-related increments in metamemory (MM) abilities. The primary aim of the current study was to explore the role of MM monitoring and control processes (i.e., procedural MM) of 7- and 8-year-old children in a PM task including specific cues. Monitoring processes were assessed by asking children to judge their own PM performance before (predictions) and after (postdictions) in performing a PM task. In addition, children were asked to report the strategy they used to remember the PM task. Reactive effects of making predictions and using strategies were assessed via both an ongoing task (OT) and PM performance. EF and declarative MM performance was also examined. Results showed that children who were asked to predict PM performance had faster PM response times (RTs), but not higher accuracy rates, than children in a control group. However, strategy use affected both PM and OT performance, with those children reporting active strategy use obtaining higher PM accuracy rates and slower OT RTs. Finally, switching abilities were also predictive of OT performance. This investigation highlights the importance of studying MM monitoring and control processes in relation to children's PM.

The role of declarative and procedural metamemory in event-based prospective memory in school-aged children.

Prospective memory (PM) develops considerably during the primary school years (7 or 8years of age). Developmental changes have been mainly related to executive functions, although it has been recently suggested that PM would also potentially benefit from metamemory (MM). To date, only procedural MM, operationalized as performance predictions, has been investigated in relation to PM, whereas declarative MM has remained unexplored. Adults' performance has been shown to improve with predictions, but only in a resource-demanding (i.e., categorical) PM task rather than a more automatic (i.e., specific) one. The aim of the current investigation was to study whether PM performance of 7-year-old children (N=59) would benefit from performance predictions. Thus, half of the children predicted their performance and half of them received standard instructions for two PM tasks: one including categorical PM targets and one including specific ones. To investigate the processes underlying the retrieval of PM targets and the effect of predictions, we obtained measures for declarative MM, inhibitory control, and working memory (WM). Results revealed that children benefitted from performance predictions in the categorical PM task but not in the specific one. This advantage caused slower ongoing task response times, suggesting that strategic monitoring processes were enhanced. Moreover, PM performance was related to WM capacity and declarative MM. However, declarative MM mainly predicted PM advantage in the prediction group, showing that children with high MM knowledge benefitted especially from performance predictions. These findings are the first showing the important relation among procedural MM, declarative MM, and PM in school-aged children.

Feature binding and the processing of global-local shapes in bilingual and monolingual children.

In the present study, we examined the effects of bilingualism and age on a color-shape binding task (assessing visual working memory) and a global-local task (assessing inhibitory processes) in a sample of 55 bilingual and 49 monolingual children 8 and 10 years old. In the color-shape binding task, corrected recognition scores increased in older children; bilingual children performed better than monolinguals in the shape-only condition, but the two groups were equally accurate in the color-only and combination conditions. In the global-local task, accuracy was higher in bilingual than in monolingual children, particularly on incongruent trials; monolingual children showed a strong global precedence effect (higher accuracy in the global than in the local conditions and greater global-to-local interference), whereas bilingual children exhibited a small, but significant, local precedence effect (higher accuracy in the local than in the global conditions and greater local-to-global interference). These findings confirm and extend previous evidence indicating that the bilingualism advantage is more pronounced in working memory tasks involving inhibitory processes.