Relationship Between Future Thinking and Prospective Memory in Alzheimer’s Disease

Background: Future thinking and prospective memory are two cognitive processes oriented toward the future and reliant on the ability to envision oneself in future scenarios. Objective: We explored the connection between future thinking and prospective memory in individuals with Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Methods: We invited both AD participants and control participants to engage in event-based prospective memory tasks (e.g., “please hand me this stopwatch when I inform you there are 10 minutes remaining”) and time-based prospective memory tasks (e.g., “close the book you are working on in five minutes”). Additionally, we asked participants to engage in a future thinking task where they imagined upcoming events. Results: Analysis revealed that AD participants exhibited lower performance in both prospective memory tasks and future thinking compared to the control group. Importantly, we identified significant positive correlations between the performance on event- and time-based prospective memory tasks and future thinking abilities among AD participants. Conclusions: These findings underscore the connection between the decline in both prospective memory domains and the ability to envision future events in individuals with AD. Our results also shed light on the challenges AD individuals face when trying to project themselves into the future to mentally pre-experience upcoming events.