Eye PM - Can eye movements reveal (dynamic) age and task related changes in prospective memory?

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Sebastian Pannasch
• Subject Area: Developmental and Educational Psychology
• Term: from 2016 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 290727620

The current project aims at studying age differences between young and older adults in prospective memory processes by using eyetracking. Prospective memory has been called one of the most important memory functions of everyday life (Maylor, 1990) and is especially important for older people who depend on medication. Current behavioural studies show declining prospective memory performance with age in laboratory studies. However, results are inhomogeneous. Therefore it remains unclear, whether these deficits result from reduced cognitive resources, inflexibility in using available resources or metacognitive shortfalls. With eyetracking underlying attentional processes of prospective memory can be revealed. It enables insight in differences in prospective memory task approaches, influences of task specifics on monitoring behaviour as well as dynamic changes in task approaches due to task specifics and age. Based on the multiprocess framework by McDaniel and Einstein (2000) three task specifics have been selected for the current project, which, regarding age differences, have so far shown few and partly inhomogeneous results: manipulation of prospective memory cue salience, difficulty of the ongoing task and importance of prospective memory and ongoing task. These tasks specifics influence the necessity of resource intensive processes to solve them. Also, they cover different phases of prospective remembering (encoding and retrieval). The project comprises three experiments. In each one of the named task specifics is manipulated while all other parameters remain constant. Each experiment consists of two prospective memory tasks, a natural viewing and a visual search task. Natural viewing is used as baseline as it includes only the ongoing task which is used in the prospective memory tasks as well. Differences in eye movement parameters between natural viewing and prospective memory task would therefore point towards strategic processes in solving the prospective memory task and would argue against spontaneous processes. Visual search on the other hand encourages a strategic task approach, requiring a specific reaction after having spotted a predefined cue. By comparing these four tasks processes are revealed that lead to success and failure in prospective memory tasks.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Switzerland
• Co-Investigator: Professorin Dr. Katharina Schnitzspahn