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Updated: Jun 17, 2026

Examining Recall Memory in Infancy and Early Childhood Using the Elicited Imitation Paradigm
Published on: April 28, 2016
The cognitive processes underlying event-based prospective memory in school-age children and young adults: a formal
Rebekah E Smith1, Ute J Bayen, Claudia Martin
1Department of Psychology, The University of Texas at San Antonio, One UTSA Circle, San Antonio, TX 78249, USA. rebekah.smith@utsa.edu
Abstract:
Fifty children 7 years of age (29 girls, 21 boys), 53 children 10 years of age (29 girls, 24 boys), and 36 young adults (19 women, 17 men) performed a computerized event-based prospective memory task. All 3 groups differed significantly in prospective memory performance, with adults showing the best performance and with 7-year-olds showing the poorest performance. We used a formal multinomial process tree model of event-based prospective memory to decompose age differences in cognitive processes that jointly contribute to prospective memory performance. The formal modeling results demonstrate that adults differed significantly from the 7-year-olds and the 10-year-olds on both the prospective component and the retrospective component of the task. The 7-year-olds and the 10-year-olds differed only in the ability to recognize prospective memory target events. The prospective memory task imposed a cost to ongoing activities in all 3 age groups.
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