Do preschoolers remember what to do? Incentive and external cues in prospective memory

Prospective memory, which involves remembering to perform an action at a fu ture time, is used frequently in daily life. Few researchers, however, have studied this type of memory with children. The present study examined and compared 3- and 5-year-olds' performance on naturalistic and computer-based prospective memory tasks. The effects of incentive and external cues on me mory performance were examined along with the relationship between prospect ive and retrospective memory. The results indicated that 5-year-olds demons trated greater prospective memory performance than did 3-year-olds and neit her incentive nor external cues consistently improved performance. Relation ships between performance on the naturalistic and computer tasks varied wit h age. In contrast to the adult literature, younger children's prospective and retrospective memory performances were related. Implications of these f indings are discussed. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.