Entwistle, R. & Rusted, J.
Department of Psychology. University of Sussex. Brighton, U.K.
In everyday life older adults are able to compensate for age-related declines in cognitive processing resources by using pre-established knowledge structures. We investigated whether familiarity could facilitate prospective memory (PM) performance in older adults. Participants (37 older, 40 younger) were randomly assigned to sort a familiar or unfamiliar deck of cards. The number of correctly identified PM cues, reaction times to PM cues and reaction times to sort the cards were recorded. For PM accuracy, older adults performed worse than younger adults in the unfamiliar condition but performed equally as well as them in the familiar condition. Paradoxically, the cost to ongoing performance was only observed in the familiar card condition for both groups. We conclude that activation of the familiar cards improves PM performance but interferes with peoples’ ability to perform the ongoing task and does not release resources as expected.