Everyday memory failures across adulthood: Implications for the age prospective memory paradox

by Agnieszka Niedźwieńska, Józefina Sołga, Patrycja Zagaja, Magdalena Żołnierz

Despite the prevalence of everyday memory failures, little is known about which specific types have the strongest impact on everyday life, and whether their impact changes across adulthood. An investigation of memory failures at different ages is particularly informative to disentangle the age paradox in prospective memory, which seems to suggest that remembering to perform intended actions in everyday life improves with age. Therefore, 58 young adults, 40 middle-aged adults, and 54 elderly adults recorded their memory failures as and when they occurred during a 7-day period, and described how serious and consequential they were. Failures were coded into several subcategories of retrospective memory, prospective memory, and absent-minded lapses. It was prospective memory lapses that were overall the most common, serious and consequential ones. Young adults had substantially more prospective memory failures than the elderly and middle-aged adults who did not differ from each other. A young adult disadvantage still held up when lifestyle differences between young adults and the elderly were taken into account. Our findings support the age-related benefit previously found in naturalistic prospective memory tasks, and suggest that it is robust across various types of prospective memory tasks. The results also suggest that the benefit may result from both young adults having poor everyday prospective memory, compared to any adults of a greater age, and everyday prospective memory being spared from age-related decline between the middle and late adulthood.