The cognitive cost of event-based prospective memory in children

• Children as young as 4 are negatively affected by prospective memory instructions.
• The cost may reflect a strategic allocation to balance demands of multiple tasks.
• Appropriate strategy allocation in this task does not improve with age.

Prospective memory is the act of remembering to perform an action in the future, often after the presentation of a cue. However, processes involved in remembering the future intention might hinder performance on activities leading up to and surrounding the event in which an intention must be carried out. The current study was designed to assess whether young children who were asked to engage in prospective memory do so at a cost to current cognitive processing. Participants (4-, 5-, and 6-year-olds) either performed a simple ongoing selection task only (control condition) or performed the selection task with an embedded prospective memory task (experimental condition). Results revealed that children in the experimental condition were slower in the execution of the ongoing task relative to children in the control condition, lending support to the theory that children as young as 4 years selectively allocate resources in an effort to succeed in multiple tasks.