| 其他摘要 | Prospective memory (PM) refers to the ability to remember to complete an intended action at a specific time in the future. Recent studies have shown that common methods for improving children's PM include episodic future thinking, setting reminder and improving cue salience, etc., but the effects of each method are not consistent. At present, there is a lack of research on the effect size, mechanism and influencing factors of different promoting methods for PM in children. The comparison of the effect and mechanism of different promotion methods can not only help us further understand the differences of promoting methods, but may also provide theoretical support for selecting appropriate promotion methods for children. This paper will attempt to answer these questions through three studies.
In Study 1, a meta-analysis study on PM promoting methods in children and adolescents was conducted. A total of 21 articles were screened, including three methods, namely, the episodic future thinking (6 articles) method, the cue-salience method (7 articles) and the reminder method (8 articles).The results showed that the three promotion methods had similar promoting effects on PM performance in children and adolescents. The episodic future thinking method had a medium to large effect, with small heterogeneity among studies; the cue-salience method had a large effect, but with large heterogeneity among studies; the reminder method also had a medium to large effect, but with large heterogeneity among studies. Further analysis found that with increase of age, the promoting effect of reminder also increased. In addition, the focality of PM cue moderated the effect of cue-salience, showing as larger effect of cue salience in the focal than the non-focal condition.
In Study 2, we selected two different promoting methods, top-down processing of "episodic future thinking " and bottom-up processing of "cue-salience", and investigated the promoting effects and mechanisms of these two methods on the event-based PM in school-age children. We also investigated the influence of children's executive functions on these promotion effects. A total of 126 children aged 8-12 years old were randomly divided into three groups: the standard instruction group(given standard instruction), the cue-salience group(increase the salience of PM cue) and the episodic future thinking group(imagine the environment and process of PM task). The results showed that in the computerized game-like task and trial-based computer task, the PM performance of the cue-salience group was better than that of the episodic future thinking group and the standard group, while there was no difference between the latter two groups. In the naturalistic task, none of the promoting methods showed significant effects. The cue-salience did not increase PM performance at the cost of impairing current task. In addition, the children’s executive functions did not influence the beneficial effects of cue-salience on PM. To sum up, in event-based PM task of school-age children, cue-salience had significant promoting effect in the computerized game task and trial-based computer task, while episodic future thinking did not have an effect.
In Study 3, we further investigated the promoting effects of episodic future thinking and cue salience on the time-based PM in school-age children, and the influence of children's executive function level on these effects. Similar to Study 2, 126 school-age children aged 8-12 years old were randomly divided into the standard group, the cue-salience group, and the episodic future thinking group. The results showed that in all the time-based PM tasks, the cue-salience group showed better PM performance than the episodic future thinking and the control group, while episodic future thinking did not show any effect. The cue-salience group did not change the ongoing task performance and showed reduced time monitoring behaviour, suggesting that salient cues played a role in cognitive offload in children's time-based PM task. In the computer game-like task, children with higher working memory capacity are more likely to benefit from salient PM cues than those with lower working memory capacity. In time-based PM task of school-age children, cue-salience had stable promoting effect while episodic future thinking did not have any effect.
In summary, this paper summarized methods for promoting PM in children and adolescents in a meta-analysis, and compared two promoting methods (i.e., episodic future thinking and cue-salience) on the event-based and time-based PM of school-age children using two experiments. There are three main findings. First, the meta-analysis indicated that episodic future thinking, cue-salience and reminder had similar beneficial effects on PM performance of children and adolescents. Cue focality mediated the effect of cue-salience. Second, in school-age children, cue-salience improved event-based PM performance in the game-like PM task and trial-based PM task in a relatively automatic way, but it had no effect in the naturalistic PM task. The episodic future thinking failed to show any promoting effect in all event-based PM tasks. Third, in the time-based PM of school-age children, cue-salience showed a stable promoting effect in PM tasks, and the mechanism was relatively automatic. When the time cues became salient, children could actively adjust the allocation of cognitive resources between time monitoring and ongoing task, and they reduced the monitoring times to improve ongoing task performance. The episodic future thinking still did not have a promoting effect. The results enhance the understanding of the influencing factors and mechanisms of different methods of enhancing children's prospective memory, and provide scientific basis for the application of appropriate methods in different scenarios in the future. |
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