Effect of age on event-based and time-based prospective memory.

The magnitude of age differences on event- and time-based prospective memory tasks was investigated in 2 experiments. Participants performed a working memory task and were also required to perform either an event- or time-based prospective action. Control participants performed either the working memory task only or the prospective memory task only. Results yielded age differences on both prospective tasks. The age effect was particularly marked on the time-based task. Performance of the event-based prospective task, however, had a higher cost to performance on the concurrent working memory task than the time-based task did, suggesting that event-based responding has a substantial attentional requirement. The older adults also made a significant number of time-monitoring errors when time monitoring was their sole task. This suggests that some time-based prospective memory deficits in older adults are due to a fundamental deficit in time monitoring rather than to prospective memory.