Page No 131-140
Nisha Malik, Amrita Yadava and NovRattan Sharma
M.D.University, Rohtak, Haryana
An essential part of routine, everyday functioning is forming an intention, and remembering
to execute the same.Failure to remember the intention can disrupt important tasks in
people of all ages. This kind of memory has been termed as Prospective Memory (PM)
and it plays a significant role when multiple tasks have to be performed simultaneously
and routine actions are taken up by automated processing. The present investigation
was conducted to study the developmental progression of Prospective Memory in order
to identify the stage at which significant deficits in PM occur and study the relation
between objective PM performance and subjective perception of PM performance/
deficits. A purposive sample of 250 respondents was selected from five developmental
ages (n=50) One way ANOVA was used to analyze the significance of difference among
the mean subjective and objective PM scores of the five groups. A significant effect of
age was evinced for both the subjective and objective PM scores.Results indicated that
a significant decline in objective PM occurred in adulthood (26-40 yrs) and the memory
deficit increased progressively into old age(61-75yrs). Subjective PM was found to be
similar in adolescents and young adults and a decline was observed with the onset of
adulthood, but no significant variation was observed across the adult age span(26-75
yrs). However, subjective judgment of PM was at variance with actual performance