Anxiety and errors of prospective memory among elderly people

Understanding the relationship between age and prospective memory may be increased by studying the distribution and constituents of incorrect responses. Failure to perform the right activity at the right time may manifest itself as an 'error of omission', in which no response is made at the critical moment, or an 'error of commission', in which the intended action is replaced by a related one. These may, in turn, result from breakdown of encoding/storage or from retrieval failure. Which error is made may depend on the nature of the task, the context or the available processing resources of the performer. Responses of a group of elderly people to the appointment item of the Rivermead Behavioural Memory Test were examined for frequency of occurrence of different types of error and their relationship to other variables. Logistic regression analysis was used to explore the contribution made by variables of anxiety, age and current intelligence to performance on the task. The results suggest that the relationship is a complex one, in which there is an inverse relationship between anxiety and intelligence, and error type is differentially related to low and high anxiety and to age.