Researchers are attempting to disentangle the Age Prospective Memory Paradox, which suggests that, contrary to expectation, certain types of memory failures may become less frequent with age. Prospective memory (PM) is the ability to remember to perform actions at particular future moments. While significant age-related benefit appear in laboratory-based PM tasks, older adults (61–80 years) outperform younger adults across PM tasks in everyday life. Could this age-related benefit result from lifestyle differences between older participants and the younger college students invariably used as study subjects? Compared to these students, older adults may have more regular patterns of living with more routine activities, increasing opportunities to plan the execution of PM tasks. However, a young-adult disadvantage persisted in a study accounting for lifestyle differences.
