Age-related deficits in prospective memory: the influence of task complexity

Younger and older subjects were asked to perform an action whenever target words occurred during a short-term memory task. The difficulty of this prospective memory task was manipulated by varying the delay preceding the occurrence of a target event and by varying the number of different target events. Age-related performance differences emerged when there were several different target events but not when there was one target event presented several times. Age-related performance differences, when they occurred, were associated with poorer retrospective memory for the target events. The results were interpreted in terms of a componential analysis of prospective memory, which assumes both similarities and differences between prospective and retrospective memory.