Reminders Eliminate Age-Related Declines in Prospective Memory

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 PM for offloaded (i.e., with reminders) and non-offloaded (i.e., without reminders) intentions under low and high memory demands. With highly specific intentions that can be retrieved via bottom-up processes (Exp. 1 and 2), there were no age differences in PM without reminders and younger and older adults equally benefitted from reminders under high memory load. With nonspecific intentions that require top-down attention for retrieval (Exp. 3), older adults had worse PM under high load without reminders. Critically, this age difference was eliminated with the use of reminders, likely due to increased reminder checking for older adults under high load. These findings suggest that offloading can circumvent cognitive capacity limitations and minimize computational effort to improve intention fulfillment in older adults. The theoretical and applied ramifications of these findings are discussed.