Factors explaining age-related prospective memory performance differences: a meta-analysis

The age-prospective memory paradox states that younger adults perform better than older adults in laboratory tasks, while the opposite has been observed for naturalistic tasks. These terms insufficiently characterise tasks and task settings. We therefore revisited the age-prospective memory paradox using a newly developed taxonomy to better understand how tasks characteristics or task settings contribute to age-related differences in performance.

We conducted a meta-analysis of 138 studies, classifying prospective memory tasks according to our newly developed taxonomy. The taxonomy included 9 categories that considered how close any task or task setting was to daily life.

When categorizing relevant studies with this taxonomy, we found that older adults did better than younger adults in ‘close to real-life’ tasks done at home and, particularly, in to-do lists and diary tasks. However, they did worse in ‘far from real-life’ tasks done in naturalistic environments or in simulations of real-life tasks in a laboratory.

Results of this meta-analysis suggest that the level of abstraction of a task and familiarity of the environment in which the task is taken can explain some of the differences between performances of younger and older people. This is relevant for the choice of task settings and task properties to experimentally address any prospective memory research questions that are being asked.