Article
Reference
The effects of ongoing task absorption on event-based prospective memory in preschoolers
ZHANG, Xinyuan, et al.
Abstract
The current study applied a 2 × 2 experimental design to investigate the effects of ongoing task absorption on event-based prospective memory performance of children aged 3 and 5 years. Children were required to label pictures as ongoing task but to remember to refrain from picture naming and to respond to the target cues in a different way as the prospective memory task. Two differently absorbing ongoing tasks (high absorbing scenario game task vs.
low absorbing computerbased task) were administered. Results indicated that prospective memory performance of 5-year-old children was significantly better than that of 3-year-old children. Ongoing task absorption affected the ongoing task performance of preschoolers, but not overall prospective memory performance. Only the 3-year-olds were negatively affected by high ongoing task absorption, which was not the case for the 5-year-olds. The findings are discussed within the light of the multiprocess theory.
ZHANG, Xinyuan, et al. The effects of ongoing task absorption on event-based prospective memory in preschoolers. European Journal of Developmental Psychology, 2019, vol. 16, no. 2, p. 123-136
DOI : 10.1080/17405629.2017.1346503
Available at:
http://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:120913
Disclaimer: layout of this document may differ from the published version.
The Effects of Ongoing Task Absorption on Event-based Prospective Memory in Preschoolers
Xinyuan Zhang, Nicola Ballhausen, Si Liu, Matthias Kliegel & Lijuan Wang
The current study applied a 2 × 2 experimental design to investigate the effects of ongoing task absorption on event-based prospective memory performance of children aged 3 and 5 years.
Children were required to label pictures as ongoing task but to remember to refrain from picture naming and to respond to the target cues in a different way as the prospective memory task.
Two differently absorbing ongoing tasks (high absorbing scenario game task vs. low absorbing computer-based task) were administered. Results indicated that prospective memory performance of 5-year-old children was significantly better than that of 3-year-old children.
Ongoing task absorption affected the ongoing task performance of preschoolers, but not overall prospective memory performance. Only the 3-year-olds were negatively affected by high ongoing task absorption, which was not the case for the 5-year-olds. The findings are discussed within the light of the multiprocess theory.
Keywords: Event-based prospective memory; preschoolers; ongoing task absorption; scenario game task; computerized task.
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:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17405629.2017.1346503.
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Prospective memory refers to the capacities that enable an individual to remember to perform an intended action at the appropriate moment (Einstein & McDaniel, 1990). Prospective memory tasks are common in the lives of preschoolers. For instance, children in kindergarten often need to remember to return picture books to their original place when they finished reading them. Although the majority of research in the field of prospective memory focused on later adult-hood, the development of prospective memory during childhood has received more attention in recent years (e.g., Kliegel & Jäger, 2007; Kvavilashvili, Kyle, & Messer, 2008;
Kvavilashvili, Messer, & Ebdon, 2001; Mahy & Moses, 2011; Wang, Kliegel, Liu, & Yang, 2008; Zimmermann & Meier, 2006; Zhang, Zuber, Liu, Kliegel, & Wang, 2017). So far, studies have found a developmental trajectory with increasing prospective memory 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 prospective memory during preschool age, studies report somewhat disparate results regarding children’s prospective memory capacities. Although most studies indicate an increase of prospective memory capacities between the age of 3 and the age of 5 (e.g., guajardo & Best, 2000; Kliegel & Jäger, 2007; Mahy, Moses, & Kliegel, 2014), some do not find such age-related differences in preschoolers’ performance (see e.g., Kliegel, Brandenberger, & Aberle, 2010;
Somerville, Wellman, & cultice, 1983; Walsh, Martin, & courage, 2014). Following the suggestions of Einstein and McDaniel (1990), in most of these studies the prospective memory task was embedded in an ongoing task. However, methodologically important, the ongoing tasks varied considerably across studies.
One very influential model that aims to explain prospective memory processing and associated developmental effects is the multiprocess theory by McDaniel and Einstein (2000).
It states that depending on specific task or individual characteristics, prospective memory cues served to retrieve the intention either by monitoring for the cue or by spontaneous retrieval.
One of these task characteristics that are predicted to directly affect the processes utilized is
ongoing task absorption. The more absorbing the ongoing activity, the less likely that resources would be available for strategic approaches to prospective memory or that subjects would successfully remember to adopt strategic approaches (McDaniel & Einstein, 2000). In details, different ongoing tasks can vary with regard to how absorbing they are, and thus, how they load on the attention to be reserved for their processing. The more attentional resources are absorbed by the ongoing task, the less resources are left to perform the prospective memory task. Because the amount of cognitive resources is limited in children, differently absorbing ongoing tasks might impact preschooler’s prospective memory performance, resulting in more impaired performance for high as compared to low absorbing tasks. From a developmental perspective, as the amount of cognitive resources is more restricted in younger preschoolers than in older ones, developmental differences should appear most notably if ongoing task absorption is high.
Thus, prospective memory performance and, more particularly, developmental differences might depend on the nature of the ongoing activity.
The ongoing activity can vary in terms of how absorbing, engaging, or demanding it is (McDaniel & Einstein, 2000). So far, only a few studies investigated this factor in young children. Kliegel et al. (2013) directly addressed the assumptions of the multiprocess theory, testing young schoolchildren with ongoing tasks that were differently demanding. Results indicated that easier ongoing tasks led to better prospective memory performance than the more difficult ones, confirming the prediction of the multiprocess theory in children. A second study investigated the influence of ongoing task difficulty on prospective memory performance in 4- and 5-year-olds. In their study, Mahy, Moses, and Kliegel (2014) did not show an influence of ongoing task difficulty on prospective memory performance. This is in contrast to Kliegel et al.
(2013) and in contrast to the multiprocess theory (McDaniel & Einstein, 2000). In a third study, Wang et al. (2008) varied the retrospective load, which means that half of the children had to keep in mind the words they named during the ongoing task for a later retrospective memory
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performance.
These mixed results raise the question of whether ongoing task absorption really affects prospective memory performance in children. There are many aspects that would determine level of absorption, including the ongoing task itself, its speed of presentation, individual interests, and the physiological state of the organism (McDaniel & Einstein, 2000).
Conceptually, in the present study we argue that previous studies may in fact not have addressed ongoing task absorption properly, as it is likely that not only the difficulty of the ongoing task per se, but the fact of really being engaged in and therefore absorbed by the ongoing task might be crucial for the impact of ongoing task load on prospective memory performance. This might be of particular importance in preschool children as that have only limited resources at disposal that need to be allocated to both the ongoing task and the prospective memory task. The more they are really absorbed by the ongoing task, the harder it would be to switch from the ongoing task to the prospective memory task. As a result, prospective memory performance should be negatively affected by high ongoing task absorption.
Indeed, from a methodological point of view, the different ongoing tasks used in the studies on preschool children so far certainly vary in the amount of how engaging they are. Hence, the different ongoing tasks differ in how much they compete for the amount of resources available to perform a prospective memory task additionally to the ongoing task. Some studies used rather low engaging ongoing tasks like card tasks in which participants are asked to name objects on different cards (e.g., Ford, Driscoll, Shum, & Macaulay, 2012; Kliegel & Jäger, 2007;
Kvavilashvili & Ford, 2014; Kvavilashvili et al., 2001; Mahy & Moses, 2011, 2015). Similarly, some studies used a naming task as well but presented the pictures on a computer (e.g., Cheie, Miclea, & Visu-Petra, 2014; Guajardo & Best, 2000). These two types of ongoing tasks are very likely not to be very absorbing. By contrast, some studies used scenario games as ongoing tasks (Kliegel et al., 2010; Meacham & Dumitru, 1976; Nigro, Brandimonte, Cicogna, & Cosenza, 2014; Slusarczyk & Niedzwienska, 2013; Somerville et al., 1983; Walsh et al., 2014; Wang et
al., 2008). In these tasks, children are involved in a kind of cover story or played a game that engaged the children to a greater extent than when they were simply accomplishing a task itself.
These diverging ongoing tasks not only make it harder to compare different studies but they might even be driving the occurrence of age effects: In more absorbing tasks as for instance the scenario games, many resources might be drained by the ongoing task. As younger children have more restricted resources at disposal than the older ones, the younger might perform worse than older children, thus, age effects would occur. By contrast, if only few resources are required for the ongoing task, as it would be the case in tasks as naming objects (computerized or on cards), age effects should be smaller or even not existing. No study so far compared these different levels of engagement in preschoolers. Thus, we aim to extend the existing literature that investigated the impact of the ongoing task in preschoolers by not only varying ongoing task difficulty or ongoing task demand, but using differently absorbing ongoing tasks.
The present paper aims at targeting the effect of ongoing task absorption in 3 and 5 year old preschoolers and therefore contributes to the existing literature. Previous studies employed different ongoing tasks; however, conceptually important, the impact of ongoing task absorption on that age group and on age effects is not clear. It is suggested that different absorbing ongoing tasks affect prospective memory performance as well as age effects.
Therefore, the following predictions were made based on the literature: (a) older children (5- year-olds) show better prospective memory performance than younger ones (3-year-olds), (b) different levels of ongoing task absorption affect preschooler’s prospective memory performance with better prospective memory performance for low (as in computerized naming tasks) as compared to high absorbing tasks (as scenario game tasks), and (c) ongoing task absorption affects age-related differences: while age differences can be found in high absorbing tasks, these differences should not be appear in low absorbing tasks.
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METHOD Participants
The original sample included 89 children aged 3 and 5 years who were recruited from Yitian and Zhongxin kindergartens (both affiliated with the Northeast Normal Primary School of China), and from the third kindergarten (affiliated with Jilin University of China) in Changchun.
Only children who were able to repeat the instructions at the beginning, who were able to recall the prospective memory instructions at the end of the procedure and who could finish all of the tasks in time were included in the subsequent analyses. Due to these criteria, nine participants of the first kindergarten grade group could not be included, but all participants from the third kindergarten grade group. Finally, data of 80 children were included in subsequent analyses.
The final sample consisted of 40 children from the first kindergarten grade (M = 3.61 years, SD
= 0.25; 18 boys and 22 girls), and 40 children from the third kindergarten grade (M = 5.75 years, SD = 0.09; 21 boys and 19 girls). All subjects had normal eyesight, came from middle-income Chinese families, were from the same Asian ethnicity, and preschool admittance tests did not reveal any noticeable problems with regard to language or general cognitive abilities.
Design
The study used a (task-switching) paradigm following a 2 (age, i.e., 3 or 5 years) × 2 (ongoing task absorption, i.e., high absorbing scenario game task vs. low absorbing computerized naming task) between-subjects design. This approach asked participants to immediately stop performing the ongoing task whenever they encountered the prospective memory cue and to switch to the prospective memory task (Bisiacchi, Schiff, Ciccola, & Kliegel, 2009). Subjects were randomly assigned to the ongoing task absorption condition.
Materials
Ongoing tasks
Depending on the experimental condition, differently absorbing ongoing tasks were to be accomplished, but the underlying task (i.e., naming objects) was kept constant for both conditions. Under the high absorbing scenario game task, participants were invited to play a game with the experimenter and the whole testing session was conducted in an active and playful way that engaged the children to a large extent in the game. Children were required to help a puppet to go home. In order to do so, they had to turn over and identify picture cards on the floor in a 5 × 5 square grid with two blank spaces (25 spaces total). Picture cards, each with a number on the back, were assigned to 23 of the spaces. The children were then asked to step or jump with double-leg steps onto a card in the grid following the numbers on the backs. Note that most of 3-year-olds were able to read the numbers from 1 to 23, otherwise the experimenters helped them, as this was not of importance for the ongoing task. They would then turn around that card and attempt to name the picture on it. Conversely, under the computer task condition,
children were instructed to name the pictures presented on a computer screen. The pictures were displayed until the participants pressed the key with the next number on the keyboard, then the next picture was shown. Subjects’ activity scope and involvement degree was low. Compared to the other condition, the experimenter was more passive and, apart from the instructions, interacted sparsely with the child. We let three experimenters and ten preschool teachers assess the ongoing task absorption by 5 points. There was significant difference between high absorbing scenario game task (M = 4.85, SD = 0.38) and low absorbing computerized naming task (M = 2.78, SD = 0.44), t(12) = 11.69, p < .001.
In order to investigate the improvement of prospective memory, and to ensure the results were due to ongoing task absorption rather than picture content, we used the same pictures under both conditions, namely pictures from the categories animals, plants, daily necessities, tools, and others. In total, the material comprised 50 pictures that were extensively screened out
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through several piloting steps1. Ten pictures (i.e., strawberry, moon, or fish) were used in the practice stage for the two groups, another forty images (i.e., cat, flower, or bicycle, 20 pictures each age group) were utilized in the formal experiment. The pictures in each condition were presented in a fixed pseudo-randomized order.
Prospective memory task.
For the prospective memory task, children in all conditions additionally were instructed to stop naming the card and to tell the experimenter “Got it” as soon as they saw a card with a house printed on it. Three different house pictures were shown as target cues during the ongoing task at trial 7, 14 and 21.
Procedure
The experiment was conducted individually in a quiet room. Children received ongoing task instructions according to their experimental condition. As soon as they understood the instructions of the ongoing task, the experimenter led the subjects to perform the practice task for which they had to name ten cards until they got all ten cards right. The children were subsequently instructed with the prospective memory task. After each participant understood the prospective memory instructions, they were given a two-minute interference task to eliminate any trace of the prospective memory task that might be active in their working memory. For the interference task, children were allowed to draw anything they wanted to on a
1 First, 150 images were selected from the Internet. We subsequently asked participants who were recruited for the materials screening (n = 60; M3-year = 3.54, SD = 0.31; M5-year = 5.51, SD
= 0.28) to name these pictures. Fifty pictures with an accuracy proportion of 70% – 90% in each age group were selected. Average accuracy of naming the selected images did not differ between the two age groups, χ2 = .02, p = .886. Second, given the different styles of the pictures, we invited an art student from the Art and Design Institute of Shenyang Normal University to depict the selected images on A4 paper to generate uniform pictures. All these pictures were photographed with a digital camera (12 megapixels), and the digital pictures were used in the formal experiment (printed on real cards or presented with E-Prime in the computer condition).
blank A4 paper. Drawings were checked for depictions of a house or anything related to that afterwards, but no child drew a house or anything including a house or a part of a house. The participants then proceeded to the formal experimental block, which comprised the ongoing task plus three prospective memory target pictures. Children in any of the two ongoing task conditions were required to turn cards over using an ordered number system, with the cards then remaining face-up. Finally, the children were asked to recall the prospective memory instruction, then they were thanked for their participation and got a present.The experiments were conducted in Chinese and in total, the testing session lasted approximately 15–20 minutes.
Scores
OT accuracy was calculated by dividing the number of correctly named cards by the number of total cards (=20). Prospective memory accuracy was calculated by dividing the number of correctly executed prospective memory actions (saying ‘got it!’ when a prospective memory target appeared) by the total number of prospective memory cues (=3).
RESULTS
If not stated differently, an alpha level of .05 was used. Post-hoc t-tests were used as pairwise comparisons for contrasts between specific conditions of the experimental factors. These tests were corrected for multiple testing using the Bonferroni correction by multiplying the p-values of each post hoc test by the number of conditions, resulting in adjusted p-values (padj) for the Bonferroni corrections (Maxwell & Delaney, 2004).
(Table 1 about here)
Prospective memory accuracy
Means and standard deviations of prospective memory performance are shown in Table 1.
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To analyze effects of age and ongoing task absorption on prospective memory accuracy, a 2 (age: 3 years, 5 years) × 2 (ongoing task absorption: low, high) analysis of variance (ANOVA) was conducted. Results revealed a significant main effect of age with older children outperforming younger ones, F(1, 76) = 12.76, p = .001, η2 = .144. By contrast, there was no significant impact of ongoing task absorption on prospective memory accuracy when collapsing over both age groups, F(1, 76) = 2.83, p = .096, η2 = .036. The interaction between age and ongoing task absorption was not significant, F(1, 76) = 1.26, p = .266, η2 = .016. However, to test our a priori hypotheses, we separated the two ongoing task absorption conditions to investigate age effects in each group. Planned comparisons revealed no age difference in the low absorbing computer task, t(38) = 1.73, padj = .182, d = 0.548, whereas age differences (better performance for 5- than for 3-year olds) were present in the high absorbing scenario game task, t(38) = 3.32, padj = .004, d = 1.051.
Ongoing task accuracy
Means and standard deviations of ongoing task performance are shown in Table 1. A 2 (age:
3 years, 5 years) × 2 (ongoing task absorption: low, high) analysis of variance (ANOVA) was conducted and did not reveal any difference with regard to age on ongoing task performance, F(1, 76) = 1.23, p = .271, η2 = .016. Ongoing task absorption had an impact on ongoing task performance with better performance in the low as compared to the high absorption condition, F(1, 76) = 6.08, p = .016, η2 = .074. There was no significant interaction between age and ongoing task absorption, F(1, 76) = .55, p = .462, η2 = .007, which was confirmed by planned comparisons investigating age effects in both absorption conditions (padjs > .285).
DISCUSSION
The present study investigated the impact of ongoing task absorption on event-based
prospective memory of preschoolers. Results revealed that (a) 5-year-old children showed significantly better prospective memory performance than 3-year-old children, (b) prospective memory performance was not generally affected by differently absorbing ongoing tasks, but (c) various absorbing ongoing tasks affected age-related effects in different ways: In high absorbing tasks, older children outperformed the younger ones. By contrast, in low absorbing tasks, young and older children performed equally. First of all, the study indicated a reliable age effect on event-based prospective memory performance with 5-year-old children performing significantly better than 3-year-old children. This conclusion confirmed the aforementioned hypothesis, as well as the viewpoint that prospective memory ability still grows in the preschool age range (Guajardo & Best, 2000; Kliegel & Jäger, 2007; Kvavilashvili et al., 2001; Mahy &
Moses, 2011, 2015; Slusarczyk & Niedzwienska, 2013; Wang et al., 2008). The results are consistent with other studies that reported a difference in prospective memory between 3 and 5 years (Guajardo & Best, 2000; Kliegel & Jäger, 2007; Slusarczyk & Niedzwienska, 2013;
Walsh et al., 2014; Wang et al., 2008). What might be underlying these effects? From the viewpoint of developmental neuropsychology, the improvement in the frontal lobe functioning may be an important developmental correlate of these effects (e.g., Diamond, 2002; Kanemura, Aihara, Aoki, Araki, & Nakazawa, 2003; Romine, & Reynolds, 2005).
As a novel perspective, in our experiment, we aimed to compare differently absorbing ongoing tasks. Importantly, ongoing task performance differed between the two levels of ongoing task absorption with higher ongoing task performance in the low absorbing task than in the high absorbing task. This finding supports a successful manipulation of ongoing task absorption. Subjective observations of higher immersion of the children in the high absorbing tasks by the experimenters as a surrogate manipulation check are in accord with that. With regard to the second hypothesis, there was no significant impact of ongoing task absorption on prospective memory accuracy in general. This finding is surprising, since this is in contrast to
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Kliegel and colleagues (2013). Nevertheless, the present finding is in line with other studies that investigated ongoing task difficulty in children (Mahy et al., 2014; Wang et al., 2008).
While other studies varied only the ongoing task difficulty or load, the present study focused on ongoing task absorption. The present results suggest that the absorption by the ongoing task per se may not be driving the effects on prospective memory performance likewise. Still, the present finding has to be treated with caution, as it might also be a result of the rather small sample size (note that prior power analyses suggested that the sample size would be large enough to detect same effect sizes as in prior studies). Therefore, further studies are required to test whether this finding holds true for replication.
Interestingly, although there was no age effect in any of the two ongoing task absorption conditions, age effects on prospective memory performance were present in the high absorbing scenario game task, but not in the low absorbing computer task. This result, based on planned a priori comparisons, has to be treated with caution, as the interaction of age and ongoing task absorption did not show up. However, the age effect size in the high absorbing condition was double the size of the one in the low absorbing condition. Equally, planned comparisons strongly suggest the aforementioned pattern of results. Nevertheless, future studies replicating that effect, also with greater sample sizes, are required. The observed pattern, confirming our third hypothesis, conceptually is in line with the multiprocess view (McDaniel & Einstein, 2000): If ongoing task absorption is high, many resources are drawn by the ongoing task. As a consequence, less resources are left in order to accomplish the prospective memory task, and it is likely that there are not enough resources at disposal for the prospective memory task. The amount of cognitive resources in 3-year-olds is more limited than in the 5-year-olds (see e.g., Carlson, 2005; Davidson, Amso, Anderson, & Diamond, 2006; Diamond, 2006; Welsh, Pennington, & Groisser, 1991; Zelazo, Müller, Frye, & Marcovitch, 2003). If a large portion of the resources of 3-year-olds have been absorbed by the ongoing task, they will show impaired prospective memory performance. If the ongoing task is low absorbing, they still have enough
resources at disposal, and their prospective memory performance is not affected, as it was the case in our study. This finding of the 3-year-olds is further in line with Kliegel and colleagues (2013), who also found an impact of ongoing task difficulty on prospective memory performance.
By contrast, the 5-year-olds have already more resources at disposal in general. Even if resources were drawn in the same way as for the 3-year-olds by the ongoing task (as there were no age differences with regard to the ongoing task performance between the two age groups), the general amount of resources is likely to be big enough so that the remaining resources were sufficient to perform the prospective memory task. For that reason, the 5-year-olds were not negatively affected by a high absorbing ongoing task. This result confirms findings by Mahy and colleagues (2014) as well as Wang and colleagues (2008) both of which did not show an effect of ongoing task load in children. Still, it is not clear whether 5-year-olds are not affected at all by high ongoing task absorption or whether only our manipulation might not have been strong (i.e., absorbing) enough for that age group. It is very likely that an even higher absorbing ongoing task that exceeds their (still limited) amount of resources would affect the 5-year-old’s prospective memory performance. Further studies should address this open question by using higher absorbing ongoing tasks.
An additional or complementary explanation of the present findings could be derived from a different factor of the multiprocess theory (McDaniel & Einstein, 2000) that might have been touched by the study, too. Accordingly, task importance is a key factor contributing to successful prospective remembering, as also shown in adults (e.g., Kliegel, Martin, McDaniel,
& Einstein, 2004; for review see Walter & Meier, 2014). Particularly in children, it is likely that different tasks are rated as differently interesting and thus important. This in turn could change the engagement and the motivation for the tasks, resulting in different resource allocations between ongoing and prospective memory task and thus different performances on either of
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preschoolers (Slusarczyk & Niedzwienska, 2013, Causey & Bjorklund, 2014). Further, while low motivation for the prospective memory task led to age effects in prospective memory performance for 3- and 5-year-olds, no age effects were showed when the prospective memory task was highly motivating (Kliegel et al., 2010). This finding indicates that based on the motivation, available resources are allocated to the task of interest and thus performance can be changed.
It might be the case that the two ongoing tasks used in our study were perceived as different interesting likewise: The 3-year-olds may have perceived the high absorbing task (scenario game) as more vivid and interesting than the low absorbing computer task, as children in that age enjoy playing. Thus, the 3-year-olds either just chose to focus their resources on the ongoing task because they found it engaging and fun to do, or although they tried to work on both tasks, for their limited inhibition capacity (see Espy, 1997) they were captured by the high absorbing ongoing task. As shown by Kliegel and colleagues (2010), children who find a task more attractive invest more resources in that task. Hence, it may be the case that because the 3-year- olds invested more resources in the scenario game than in the computerized task, less resources were left at disposal to perform the prospective memory task. The finding of no age differences in ongoing task performance, contrary to what one would expect when considering only the limited resources in children, supports the assumption that the 3-year-olds focused more on the ongoing than on the prospective memory task and thus dedicated more resources to that task.
This allocation of resources may have resulted in lower prospective memory performance for the scenario game as compared with the computerized task.
Against this, the 5-year-olds might have found the computerized task more than or at least equally interesting as the scenario game. As a result, 5-year-old children may have allocated an equal amount of resources to the computerized ongoing task as they did to the scenario game task. Hence, an equal amount of resources was left to perform the prospective memory task and therefore, their prospective memory performance may have been equally high in both ongoing
task conditions. Future studies disentangling the impact of task importance as well as motivational effects from ongoing task absorption in children are clearly needed.
Further, it would be conceptually important to investigate the exact mechanism of the effect of ongoing task absorption on younger children. It remains an open question whether younger children decide voluntarily to mainly engage in the ongoing as compared to the prospective memory task, or whether they are rather involuntarily captured by the high absorbing ongoing task due to lower inhibition capacity. To further investigate that question, follow up studies are required that alter the importance of the prospective memory task compared to the ongoing task (e.g., by providing incentives for successfully performing the prospective memory task).
Taken together, the present study investigated the role of ongoing task absorption and age in 3- and 5-year-old preschoolers. While 5-year-olds outperformed the 3-year-olds in a prospective memory task, ongoing task absorption did not influence prospective memory performance per se. This suggests that ongoing task absorption is not affecting prospective memory performance in a stronger way than ongoing task difficulty or ongoing task demand. Moreover, ongoing task absorption was shown to modulate the appearance of prospective memory age effects: While age effects between 3- and 5-year old children showed up when the ongoing task was highly absorbing, performance was equal in both age groups when the ongoing task was low absorbing.
This finding provides further support for the multiprocess theory even in young preschoolers.
When resources are very limited and drawn by a high absorbing ongoing task, prospective memory performance is affected negatively.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
MK acknowledges financial support from the Swiss National Science Foundation.
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TABLE 1
Prospective memory and Ongoing task performance
Prospective memory performance Ongoing task performance
Ongoing task absorption
3-year-olds (n = 40)
5-year-olds (n = 40)
3-year-olds (n = 40)
5-year-olds (n = 40)
M SD M SD M SD M SD
High absorbing task .27 .37 .68 .43 .87 .07 .86 .13
Low absorbing task .51 .41 .73 .38 .93 .08 .89 .08
