In one ear and out the other: Verbal reminders do not improve young children’s prospective memory performance on a virtual task
Bibliographic record
Abstract
• We examined how verbal reminders impact preschoolers’ prospective memory (PM). • We compared four reminder types: cue-action, cue-only, action-only, and control. • Reminders were given verbally to children three times during a PM task. • None of the reminder types improved children’s PM performance on the task. • Further research is needed on how to better support children’s PM abilities. Prospective memory (PM), or remembering to carry out future intentions, is an ability with which young children often struggle. Thus, it is crucial to determine how to best support the development of their PM skills. Reminders are often used to support PM, and previous research has found that reminders referencing both the PM cue and intended action can improve children’s and adults’ PM. To date, no studies have investigated the effect of verbal cue and action reminders on preschool children’s PM performance, a gap the current study intended to fill. A total of 88 North American children aged 3 to 6 years completed a PM task virtually. The PM task required children to interrupt a card-sorting task to wave at specific cards (those depicting elephants). Children were randomly assigned to receive one of the following: (a) three cue–action reminders, which referenced the PM cue (the elephants) and the intended action (waving); (b) three cue-only reminders, which referenced only the PM cue; (c) three action-only reminders, which referenced only the intended action; or (d) three irrelevant control reminders. The only significant predictor of PM performance was age, which became nonsignificant when the interaction terms were added in the model. Reminders did not have an effect on children’s PM. We consider how these findings may lend support to theories of PM development and discuss the implications of using verbal reminders to support children’s PM in everyday contexts.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".