Prospective remembering in younger and older adults: Role of the prospective cue

In these studies, adult age differences in event-based prospective memory w ere examined using an adapted version of G.O. Einstein and M.A. McDaniel's (1990) task. In Experiments 1-3, we varied prospective cue specificity by a ssigning a specific target word or an unspecified word drawn from a given t axonomic category. In Experiment 3, we manipulated cue typicality by presen ting low or high typicality target words. Results yielded positive effects of cue specificity on prospective performance. Age effects occurred when hi gh typicality target words served as prospective cues (Exps. 1 and 3), but younger and older adults performed comparably with moderate and low typical ity words (Exps. 2 and 3). Hierarchical regression analyses indicated that age accounted for a small but significant amount of variance in prospective memory, although the contribution of age was substantially reduced after s tatistically controlling for recognition memory. Implications of these data for current views on prospective remembering are discussed.