Article
Reference
The effects of task instructor status on prospective memory performance in preschoolers
ZHANG, Xinyuan, et al.
Abstract
The present study applied a 2 × 2 experimental design to assess prospective memory (PM) development across preschool age and to examine the effect of task instructor status (researcher vs. significant other) on PM performance in 80 preschool children. Participants were required to name pictures (ongoing task [OT]), and to remember to refrain from naming but instead give a different response to certain target cues (PM task). Although the OT was of comparable difficulty for both age groups (as indicated by no performance differences), results still indicated significantly higher PM performance in 5-year-olds than in 3-year-olds, confirming the age-related increase of PM capacities between 3 and 5 years. Furthermore, results showed a performance-enhancing effect of significant others as task instructors on both age-groups. Post-hoc analysis revealed that 3-year-olds instructed by a significant other still performed marginally worse than 5-year-olds instructed by a researcher, underlining the finding that substantial changes of PM capacities take place during early childhood.
ZHANG, Xinyuan, et al. The effects of task instructor status on prospective memory
performance in preschoolers. European Journal of Developmental Psychology, 2017, vol.
14, no. 1, p. 102-117
DOI : 10.1080/17405629.2016.1165660
Available at:
http://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:91454
Disclaimer: layout of this document may differ from the published version.
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The effects of task instructor status on prospective memory performance in preschoolers
Xinyuan Zhang, Sascha Zuber, Si Liu, Matthias Kliegel & Lijuan Wang
Note: This preprint is not the final copy of the record and may not exactly replicate the final version of the article. The final authenticated version is available online at:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17405629.2016.1165660.
Abstract
The present study applied a 2 × 2 experimental design to assess prospective memory (PM) development across preschool age and to examine the effect of task instructor status (researcher vs. significant other) on PM performance in 80 preschool children. Participants were required to name pictures (ongoing task), and to remember to refrain from naming but instead give a different response to certain target cues (PM task). Although the ongoing task was of comparable difficulty for both age groups (as indicated by no performance differences), results still indicated significantly higher PM performance in 5-year-olds than in 3-year-olds, confirming the age-related increase of PM capacities between 3 and 5 years. Furthermore, results showed a performance-enhancing effect of significant others as task instructors on both age-groups. Post-hoc analysis revealed that 3-year-olds instructed by a significant other still performed marginally worse than 5-year-olds instructed by a researcher, underlining the finding that substantial changes of PM capacities take place during early childhood.
Keywords: Prospective Memory; Preschoolers; Significant others; Role of Experimenter
Introduction
As early in life as during kindergarten time, pupils are sometimes asked to perform little tasks that require memorizing an action, such as remembering to bring a gift to school on a friend’s birthday or remembering to take a small amount of money to a school trip. The form of memory that is required to successfully execute such actions is referred to as prospective memory (PM), which more precisely can be defined as one’s ability to remember to perform a planned action or intention at the appropriate time in the future (Einstein & McDaniel, 1990). As in the examples mentioned, PM plays an important role in adults' as well as children's everyday functioning. In fact, PM capacities are closely linked to children’s quality of life, to their level of self-management as well as to the process of gaining independence from their parents (e.g. Kliegel & Martin, 2003; Meacham & Colombo, 1980). This underlines the importance of investigating and understanding the development of PM during childhood. Although the majority of research in the field of PM has been in later adulthood, the development of PM during childhood has received more attention in recent years (e.g. Kliegel & Jäger, 2007; Kvavilashvili, Messer, & Ebdon, 2001; Kvavilashvili, Kyle, & Messer, 2008; Mahy & Moses, 2011; Wang, Kliegel, Liu, & Yang, 2008; Zimmermann & Meier, 2006). So far, studies have found a developmental trajectory with increasing PM abilities between age 2 to age 12, with the youngest participants performing the poorest and the oldest children performing the best. Nevertheless, when looking at the exact developmental steps of PM during preschool age, studies report somewhat disparate results regarding children’s PM
capacities. Although most studies indicate an increase of PM capacities between the age of 3 and the age of 5, (e.g. Guajardo & Best, 2000; Kliegel & Jäger, 2007; Mahy, Moses, & Kliegel, 2014a), some do not find such age-related differences in preschoolers’ performance (see e.g. Somerville, Wellman, & Cultice, 1983; Kliegel, Brandenberger, & Aberle, 2010; Walsh, Martin, & Courage, 2014). Possible explanations of this inconsistency regarding children’s PM capacities might be that different studies use different types of task instructors or different levels of ongoing task demand, two factors on which we will focus in the current study.
In most previous PM studies that found age-related differences in performance, children were instructed by a researcher on when and how to perform a prospective task (e.g. Cheie, Miclea, & Visu-Petra, 2014; Mahy & Moses, 2011; Mahy, Moses, &
Kliegel, 2014b; Slusarczyk & Niedzwienska, 2013), which stands in contrast to most real life situations, where children usually receive instructions on what they should do from a familiar person such as a parent, a teacher, or a companion. Therefore, the instructing person being an unknown experimenter instead of a familiar individual could possibly lower children’s motivation or increase their anxiety towards the task.
Initially addressing this issue, Somerville et al. (1983) recruited children’s caregivers to help with the experimental instructions (i.e., children were asked by their parents to remind them to buy some candy at a later point in time) to examine PM of 2 to 4 year olds. In contrast to studies administered by an experimenter (which observe a clear-cut age advantage of older preschoolers when compared to younger preschoolers), Somerville et al.'s (1983) results showed that there was no age-related
differences when the task was instructed by a caregiver. However, in Somerville et al.'s (1983) study, all participants were instructed by caregivers, so that the exact influence of a caregiver (versus an experimenter) as task instructor could not be determined.
In consequence, for the current study, we aimed at experimentally examining for the first time the role of the task instructor by comparing children's PM performance when instructed by an unfamiliar experimenter versus when instructed by a
“significant other” (i.e., children’s teacher). The term “significant other” designates the group of individuals that have a strong (emotional) influence on a person's life, such as one's parents, siblings, teachers, companions or mates (e.g. Andersen & Chen, 2002; Andersen & Cole, 1990; Brookover, Thomas, & Paterson, 1964). Given the important status that they engage in other people’s lives, social, cognitive as well as other experimental psychologists have studied the impact of significant others on individuals' (self-)perception, their cognition, their memory or even their well-being.
Socio-psychological theories on relational schemas (e.g., Baldwin, 1992; Planalp, 1987) postulate that every time an individual interacts with another person, this activates mental representations of that person, of the individual itself with that person, as well as of their relationship itself (e.g., Andersen & Cole, 1990; Baldwin, 1992). It is through these mental representations that significant others can impact an individual. In fact, significant others are associated with certain of the individual's self-properties (such as one’s personal values, feelings, behaviors, self-assessment and notably goals) and they can even affect those self-properties (e.g. Andersen & Chen,
2002; Baldwin, 1992; Chen & Andersen, 1999; Chen, Fitzsimmons, & Andersen, 2006). For instance, when mental representations of significant others are activated, individuals are more likely to accept the significant others' expectations, objectives, and – importantly for present purposes – also goals as their own (e.g. Baldwin &
Holmes, 1987; Skorinko, Sinclair, & Conklin, 2012). More precisely, if the mental representation of a significant other is activated, one's self-esteem will be more at stake in domains that the significant other values. Horberg and Chen (2010) for example found that, if someone’s spouse values career success, that person is likely to name "career success" as more important to define who they are when the mental representation of their spouse has been activated - which illustrates the impact significant others can have on one’s self-perception. Examining participants' cognitive performance, Fitzsimons and Bargh (2003, study 4a) found that participants who wanted their mother to feel more proud of them did perform better on a verbal task, for which they had to generate as many words as possible based on a set of seven letters. Furthermore, Shah (2003) demonstrated that after priming for a mental representation of participants' fathers, participants would be faster on a lexical decision task. Examining the particularities of significant others' representations, Andersen and Cole (1990) found that participants showed shorter retrieval latencies for representations of significant others, and that the representations were more detailed and more distinguishable than the representations of non-significant others.
Although such findings underline that the question on the role of the experiment instructor is worth of further exploration, to our knowledge no study has so far
examined the effect of the task instructor on preschoolers’ PM performance by directly comparing task instructors that are familiar versus unfamiliar to the child.
Note that although the PM literature has so far fully ignored this issue, considering the previously described effects of significant others on an individual’s goals (see above), this effect may be especially relevant for PM performance. Therefore, in the present study we tested this effect for preschool children’s PM performance by comparing an experimenter condition to a condition where the instructions are given by a significant other.
Another factor possibly contributing to differences in performance when comparing 3- to 5-year-olds could be that most studies that found a clear-cut age difference in PM performance also found a significant effect of age on ongoing task performance (see e.g. Mahy et al., 2014b; Kliegel & Jäger, 2007). Thus, lower PM performance of younger participants could at least partially be the consequence of the ongoing task being more resource-demanding for them, which would leave less resources available that can be allocated towards the PM component of the task.
Therefore, using an ongoing task that is comparably difficult (or easy) for both age groups should reveal whether there are actual developmental changes of PM capacities comparing 3- to 5-year old preschoolers.
In summary, we aimed to examine (1) whether the performance of PM in 5-year-olds would be significantly better than that of 3-year-olds with an ongoing task that is of the comparable difficulty for 3- as for 5-year-olds, and (2) whether children’s PM performance would benefit from the significant others condition
compared to the researcher condition.
Methods Participants
Eighty children aged 3 and 5 years participated in our study. They were recruited from Yitian and Zhongxin kindergartens (both affiliated with the Northeast Normal Primary School of China), as well as from a third kindergarten (affiliated with Jilin University of China). Forty children were recruited from first kindergarten grade (M = 3.65 years, SD = 0.22; 22 boys and 18 girls), and forty from third kindergarten grade (M = 5.58 years, SD = 0.26; 22 boys and 18 girls). All participants were from middle-income Chinese families and were from the same Asian ethnicity. We furthermore controlled for children’s intelligence and language level on the basis of preschool or university admittance tests.
Design
We used a 2 (age: 3 vs. 5 years) × 2 (experimenter: researchers vs. significant others) between-subjects design. Children were randomly assigned to one of the two conditions.
Experimenters
Five kindergarten teachers were recruited to act as significant others. Teachers were carefully familiarized and trained with the task instructions and each teacher
only instructed children that belonged to their own class. Researchers consisted of doctoral and master students that were all selected from the department of psychology, Jilin University.
Materials
We used 50 A4-format cards representing images of different categories (e.g.
animals, plants, tools). The target cues for the PM task were three different houses.
The image selection and task difficulty evaluation was accomplished by means of a substantial pilot study with peers, in which 150 images were presented to a group of children (n = 60; M3-year = 3.54, SD = 0.31; M5-year = 5.51, SD = 0.28), and only pictures that were named correctly with an accuracy between 70 % and 90 % were selected for the actual task. Comparing the average naming accuracy for these images, there was no difference between the two age groups (χ2 = .02, p = .886).
Procedure
Participants were tested individually in a quiet room at their school. On average, the experiment lasted eleven and a half minutes and there was no difference in experiment duration between 3- and 5-year-olds (M3-year = 11.925min, SD = 2.421;
M5-year = 11.005, SD = 2.761; t(78) = 1.59, p = .117). For half of the participants, the experiment was conducted by a researcher that was unfamiliar to the participants (researcher condition), whereas the other half of participants received instructions from their teacher (significant other condition). To assess PM performance of 3- and
5-year olds, we applied a modified version1 of a PM task-switching paradigm, for which the PM task is embedded in a card naming paradigm as primary ongoing task (see e.g., Ford, Driscoll, Shum, & Macaulay, 2012; Kvavilashvili & Ford, 2014;
Kvavilashvili, Messer, & Ebdon, 2001; Mahy & Moses, 2011; Sheppard, Kretschmer, Knispel, Vollert, & Altgassen, 2015; Wang, Kliegel, Liu, & Yang, 2008). More precisely, in our study children were required to name pictures (=ongoing task) and to refrain from doing so and instead give a different response each time a PM cue appeared (=PM task; task-switching version; see Ihle et al., 2013).
In a first step, all participants were familiarized with the card-naming task.
Therefore, they were told that they would have to turn over the cards on the desk one by one and correctly name each card after turning it over. Participants then did a practice block for which they had to name ten cards until they got all ten cards right.
Next, the PM task was introduced. Children were instructed that for the next task they had to continue to name the pictures, but in addition, each time a card represented a house they would have to refrain from naming the card and say "Got it!" instead.
After giving these instructions, the experimenters made sure that children understood the PM task and that they were able to correctly explain the task on their own. This was followed by a two minute delay phase, during which children were asked to draw
1 Please note that in most classical PM card-naming paradigms applied in children, the card-naming task was split up in smaller blocks of 10 to 20 cards-to-name (see e.g., Kvavilashvili et al. 2001; Mahy
& Moses, 2011). These blocks most frequently contained between 1 and 2 PM targets only, and were interspersed with some other ongoing activities (e.g., drawing pictures, etc). The current study however used one single experimental block of 23 trials, 3 of which were PM targets. Consequently, in more classical studies the delay between each PM target generally was longer than in the present study. We thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing out this issue.
freely. Then, children had to perform the actual card-naming and PM task, which consisted of 20 card-naming and 3 PM trials. The picture cards were presented in a fixed pseudo-randomized order. For ongoing task trials, the experimenter would correct the children when they named an item incorrectly or failed to name an item at all. For PM trials, children received a positive feedback (“Right!”) every time they responded correctly to a PM card, but didn’t get any negative feedback or a reminder when they failed to detect the PM cue and answered by naming the card instead. If on PM trials children first named the card (by saying “house”) and then said “Got it!”, this was recorded as incorrect PM trial as it is standard in task-switching PM paradigms (see Ihle et al., 2013)2. At the end of the procedure, participants were asked to repeat the task instructions, and the children that were not able to recall the prospective memory instructions were excluded from the following analyses (which was the case for ten 3-year olds, and two 5-year olds).
Scores
Ongoing task accuracy was calculated by dividing the number of correctly named cards by the number of total cards (=20). PM accuracy was calculated by dividing the number of correctly executed PM actions (saying “Got it!” when a PM target appeared) by the total number of PM cues (=3).
2 We acknowledge that future studies should record these type of errors as separate error category.
Again, we are thankful for an anonymous reviewer for pointing out this issue.
Results
Table 1 shows means and standard deviations for all tasks by age.
Prospective memory accuracy.
The results revealed significant main effects of age, F(1, 76) = 22.89, p ≤ .001, η2
= .231, and of experimenter, F(1, 76) = 3.89, p = .05, η2 = .049. There was no significant interaction between age and experimenter, F(1, 76) < 1, p = .783, η2 = .001.
Follow-up analysis showed that 5-year-olds in the researcher condition still performed marginally significantly better than 3-year-olds in the significant other condition (t(38)
= 1.72, p = .095; M3-year = 0.38, SD = 0.49; M5-year = 0.63, SD = 0.43; also see Figure 1).
Ongoing tasks performance.
A 2 (age) × 2 (experimenter) analysis of variance (ANOVA) was conducted on the accuracy of the ongoing tasks. Results indicated no significant effect of neither age, F(1, 76) = 1.38, p = .244, η2 = .018, nor experimenter, F(1, 76) = 1.67, p = .200, η2 = .021. The interaction between age and experimenter was not significant, F(1, 76)
< 1. p = .726, η2 = .002
Discussion
Regarding our first research question, the current findings show that 5-year-olds achieved significantly higher PM performance than 3-year-olds. In contrast, there was no main effect of age on ongoing task accuracy, which was a prerequisite for our goal to compare 3- versus 5-year-olds PM performance with an ongoing task of
comparable difficulty for both age groups. By using an ongoing task that was equally demanding for both age groups (as indexed by no performance differences, although approaching ceiling level, as task performance accuracy ranged between 83 and 89%), we were thus able to establish that the age-related differences in PM performance we observed in fact represent substantial changes in PM capacities rather than being the consequence of children’s progression in other cognitive domains related to the OT. In the following section, we will argue that fronto-cerebral maturation and the associated increase of executive resources may be the neuropsychological underpinnings that contribute to these age-related differences.
Previous literature has established that the frontal cortex is responsible for several strategic cognitive processes that are associated with successfully executing prospective tasks, such as future-oriented thinking, anticipating the consequences of one’s actions, the reward system, planning, short-term memory and attention (e.g.
Amodio & Frith, 2006; Kane & Engle, 2002; Ridderinkhof, Ullsperger, Crone, &
Nieuwenhuis, 2004; Schacter, Addis, & Buckner, 2008). Furthermore, multiple studies have revealed a link between frontal regions and prospective remembering.
For instance, PET studies have shown that frontal lobe activity correlates with the successful maintenance of an intention (e.g. Burgess, Quayle, & Frith, 2001; Burgess, Scott, & Frith, 2003), whereas fMRI studies have allowed to directly link frontal lobe activity with the strategic components of a PM task, such as monitoring for PM cues (e.g. Beck, Ruge, Walser, & Goschke, 2014; Cona, Scarpazza, Sartori, Moscovitch, &
Bisiacchi, 2015; McDaniel, LaMontagne, Beck, Scullin, & Braver, 2013). Regarding
the cerebral development during preschool age, previous studies have shown that the frontal lobe undergoes essential structural changes between the ages 3 and age 5 (e.g., Diamond, 2002; Kanemura, Aihara, Aoki, Araki, & Nakazawa, 2003). Therefore, we propose that a more mature frontal cortex in 5-year-olds (compared to 3-year-olds) could explain better PM performance of the older preschoolers on a neurological level.
In line with this assertion, studies have furthermore shown that executive functions – which are directly related to the frontal brain regions – increase significantly during early childhood (e.g.; Davidson, Amso, Anderson, & Diamond, 2006; Diamond, 2006;
Carlson, 2005; Zelazo, Müller, Frye, & Marcovitch, 2003; Welsh, Pennington, &
Groisser, 1991). Having more executive capacities at disposal would facilitate numerous cognitive processes which are important for PM tasks, such as maintaining recently acquired information in mind, inhibiting dominant responses or switching between different tasks (e.g. Diamond, 2002; Rubinstein, Meyer, & Evans, 2001). A considerable progression of those capacities should increment the successful execution of PM tasks, as for example in our experiment, participants had to restrain from their dominant response (naming the card) and switch to executing a different action (saying “Got it!”) when they saw one of the target cards, both tasks that rely on executive capacities. In agreement with the association between executive processes and PM, Mahy et al. (2014b) recently suggested a framework in which the development of executive functioning is the main force that leads to increasing prospective capacities during early childhood. They argue that although a progression in retrospective memory is needed for remembering the planned intention (note that
this may be reflected in the higher number of 3-year olds not remembering the PM instructions at the end of the procedure, see see Kliegel & Jäger, 2007, for similar findings), developing executive processes is a crucial requirement for the successful implementation of a PM action (for more detailed description on how the executive facets are involved in PM, see Mahy et al., 2014b). Taken together, we suggest that the maturation of the frontal lobe and the augmentation of executive resources should promote the development of PM performance during preschool age.
Regarding our second hypothesis, data analysis revealed that significant others can increase PM performance in preschoolers. For both age-groups, PM performance in the significant others condition were better than the ones in the researcher condition.
Post-hoc analyses then revealed that 3-year-olds in the significant other condition still performed marginally worse than 5-year-olds in the researcher condition. Thus, even though the presence of significant others did have an enhancing effect on 3-year-olds’
PM and improved their performance compared to the researcher condition, the enhancing effect was not strong enough for them to catch up with 5-year-olds' performance in any of the two conditions.
These two results have important conceptual and methodological consequences.
Conceptually, such findings are in line with previous studies stating that a context which includes significant others can lead to a more effective encoding, which as a consequence facilitates organizing new information and therefore enhances memory performance (e.g. Andersen & Cole, 1990; Inesi & Rios, 2013). Moreover, previous literature has shown that forming more detailed intentions during the encoding phase
of a planned action can increase the likelihood of the action actually being performed later in time (e.g. Chasteen, Park, & Schwarz, 2001; Kliegel, McDaniel, & Einstein, 2000). Therefore, the presence of a significant other might have had a strong impact on the encoding of the PM instructions in our paradigm. Future studies will have to further delineate the cognitive process changes associated with the intention being presented by a specific person.
In addition, past studies have demonstrated that in some cultures, representations of significant others can lead to a stronger activation in frontal brain regions (e.g. Ng, Han, Mao, & Lai, 2010; Zhu, Zhang, Fan, & Han, 2007). More precisely, it has been shown that in Asian participants, frontal brain regions were more strongly activated by the representations of significant others as well as by representations of the self. In Western participants on the other hand, frontal regions were more strongly activated only by the representations of the self, but not by the ones of significant others.
Successful PM retrieval being linked to processes that are related to frontal activity (as elaborated above), it seems plausible that (at least in some cultures) there should be a neurophysiological relationship between PM and significant others. Future studies will have to show to what extent significant others, participants’ cultural background (and the role of the self and of others in that culture), frontal activation and PM performance are interrelated.
Besides the more effective encoding, we think that in an experimental context significant others may furthermore have a crucial impact on participants’ motivation as well as their perception of task importance, two factors that have been shown to be
essential influences on task performance (see e.g. Altgassen, Kliegel, Brandimonte, &
Filippello, 2010; Hering, Phillips, & Kliegel, 2014; Guajardo & Best, 2000; Ihle, Schnitzspahn, Rendell, Luong & Kliegel, 2012; Jeong & Cranney, 2009; Kliegel et al., 2010; McDaniel & Einstein, 2000; Slusarczyk & Niedzwienska, 2013).
Studying PM in preschoolers, Slusarczyk and Niedzwienska (2013) for instance have found that motivation played an important role for successful prospective remembering across the ages 2 to 6 years. In their study, motivation even was a prerequisite so that the youngest participants could perform the PM task at all. In line with this, Kliegel et al. (2010) argue that younger compared to older children have more limited cognitive resources and that motivation can help them to allocate their resources to the essential parts of a task. Indeed, motivation seems to account for 25 to 28% of the variance in preschoolers' PM performance (Slusarczyk & Niedzwienska, 2013; Somerville et al., 1983). Regarding task importance, Hering et al. (2014) showed that when the PM task was highlighted as important, participants allocated more attentional resources towards the PM part of the task which increased their performance. Furthermore, Walter and Meier (2014) suggested that task importance can be increased by adding a social motive to a task, such as telling participants that the task is important for a third person. As previously discussed, studies have demonstrated that significant others can have an impact on participants' motivation as well as on their perception of task importance (e.g., Andersen & Berk, 1998;
Andersen, Reznik, & Chen, 1997; Shah, 2003), we argue that by using significant others as task instructors, children were more motivated and perceived the task as
more important, which resulted in increased PM performance.
In addition to these mechanisms, replacing the unfamiliar experimenter with a significant other could lower the anxiety-component of the task. Anxiety has been shown to be a potential detriment of PM performance (e.g. Cheie et al., 2014;
Cockburn & Smith, 1994; Harris & Cumming, 2003). Arnold, Bayen and Böhm (2015) argue that this would be due to the fact that anxiety impairs working memory, which has been shown to be required to process the ongoing task and to monitor for PM cues at the same time (e.g., Zeintl, Kliegel, & Hofer, 2007). Therefore, by lowering anxiety levels in children, significant others could furthermore enhance their PM performance.
We acknowledge that the current study does unfortunately not provide any measurement of those suggested mechanisms. Therefore, future studies will have to evaluate the exact effects of significant others on participants’ motivation, the perceived task importance as well as participants' anxiety levels in the context of PM task.
Methodologically, the present findings justify deploying an unfamiliar experimenter as task instructor (instead of a significant other), which largely represents the standard procedure in experimental psychology. From a developmental perspective, relying on a traditional experimenter may indeed result in a lower performance level, but it does so across all age-groups, and therefore does not derogate the observed differences between age-groups. One might wonder why Somerville et al.'s study (1983) did not find any age differences then. One explanation might be the particularities of the PM task: As children were asked to remind their
parents to buy candy, their motivation might have been particularly high in both age groups). Therefore, if studies continue using researchers that are unfamiliar to the participants, this should not bias the results when comparing younger to older children.
One additional limitation of the current study might be that we only recruited one type of significant others - namely teachers. However, other, more “typical”
significant others (such as one's parents, siblings, companions or mates) might have an even greater promoting effect on participants. For instance, one might imagine that a parent would have a stronger effect on increasing motivation or lowering anxiety in a preschooler than a teacher does. In consequence, the question of the effect of different types of significant others, or the intensity or closeness of the relationship between the participant and the significant other, should be further explored in future studies. In the same line of thinking, it might be possible that the type of relationship between the teacher and each pupil might have a differential impact on preschoolers’
performance. To look into this, we conducted a post-hoc analysis including “teacher identity” as a covariate. As the interaction between experimenter and “teacher identity” did not reach significance (F(1,76) = .005, p = .942), at least in our paradigm all teachers seem to have had the same beneficial effect on participants’ performance.
Another limitation might be that the ongoing task might still have been somewhat more difficult for younger than for older children when using the same material for both age groups. An anonymous reviewer therefore suggested that one could chose only pictures with 100% of naming accuracy for both groups and in addition equated
the time it takes children to name the pictures. While this is of course a valid alternative approach to equate ongoing task difficulty, the present analyses and the extensive pilot study clearly suggested that on a performance and response time level there was no reliable difference between young and older children’s ongoing task performance. The interaction of ongoing task and PM task performance in preschoolers overall performance in PM paradigms will therefore have to be further examined in future studies.
In sum, the present study demonstrated age-related differences of PM capacities in 3- versus 5-year-olds and more importantly showed that better performances of 5-year-olds are not the mere consequence of higher ongoing task demand on 3-year-olds. This allowed us to conclude that there are essential and specific changes in PM capacities that take place between age 3 and age 5. In addition, the current findings also demonstrated the effect of significant others on preschoolers PM performance, showing that significant others can enhance PM performance of both 3- as well as 5-year-olds.
Acknowledgements We declare no conflict of interest.
Lijuan Wang acknowledges support from the National Science Foundation of China (NSFC).
Matthias Kliegel acknowledges support from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF).
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Table 1
Prospective memory (PM) and Ongoing Task (OT) Performance (M±SD)
PM average accuracy OT average accuracy Researchers Significant
others Researchers Significant others
3-year-olds 0.23±0.36 0.38±0.48 0.87±0.09 0.83±0.12
5-year-olds Total
0.63±0.43 0.43±0.44
0.83±0.28 0.61±0.45
0.89±0.09 0.88±0.09
0.87±0.06 0.85±0.10
Figure 1. Mean PM accuracy as a function of experimenter condition and age. Bars represent standard errors.
