Do preschoolers remember what to do? Incentive and external cues in prospective memory

Prospective memory, which involves remembering to perform an action at a future time, is used frequently in daily life. Few researchers, however, have studied this type of memory with children. The present study examined and compared 3- and 5-year-olds' performance on naturalistic and computer-based prospective memory tasks. The effects of incentive and external cues on memory performance were examined along with the relationship between prospective and retrospective memory. The results indicated that 5-year-olds demonstrated greater prospective memory performance than did 3-year-olds and neither incentive nor external cues consistently improved performance. Relationships between performance on the naturalistic and computer tasks varied with age. In contrast to the adult literature, younger children's prospective and retrospective memory performances were related. Implications of these findings are discussed. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.