The development of prospective memory in preschool children using naturalistic tasks

• There was a relationship between age and PM when the effect of RM was removed.
• PM and RM components followed the same developmental trajectory.
• Age effects in preschoolers’ prospective memory are evident in naturalistic tasks.
• Age effects in prospective memory are larger when cue specificity for retrieval is low.
• A prospective memory intention can be retained by preschoolers over a 24 hour delay.

The development of prospective memory (PM) in 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children (N = 123) was assessed in two experiments using several naturalistic game-like tasks that varied in the explicitness of the cues for retrieval that they provided. The goals of the study were to evaluate age differences in PM (a) with the effects of retrospective memory (RM) factored out and (b) as a function of increasing retrieval cue specificity. Results from Experiment 1 showed that there were age differences in PM on a simulated Shopping Trip task that favored older children after age differences attributable to RM were identified in a hierarchical regression. PM and RM components followed the same developmental trajectory. Because the Shopping Trip task provided a visual cue for retrieval, a second naturalistic PM task that was incidental to the Shopping Trip task (i.e., to ask for stickers at the end of the shopping trip) was included but provided no explicit cue other than the end of Shopping Trip task itself. A binary logistic regression showed that age did not predict children who succeeded and those who did not succeed. Because the end of the Shopping Trip task might have cued PM, two new tasks without any explicit cues for retrieval were examined in Experiment 2. Logistic regressions revealed that age predicted PM success on both tasks. With additional cues following failure to retrieve the PM intention, nearly all children succeeded, but the number of cues needed increased with age. The joint and separate contributions of PM and RM to successful task performance are discussed.