With new databases still coming on-stream, and ongoing theoretical and econometric research, the prospects for ongoing task-based research around the world seem good.
One might argue that Einstein and McDaniel [4] and others who incorporated the ease of ongoing task confound into their designs aimed to equate functional difficulty of ongoing tasks for younger and older adults and that age declines under these "functionally equated" conditions reflect true age differences in prospective memory.
While evidence based on measures of ongoing task performance supports this idea, implications for long-term consequences, that is, memory, have not been tested yet.
Thus, the lack of statistically significant age differences in Einstein and McDaniel's [4] study can be interpreted only in light of this ease of ongoing task confound that did not succeed in equating performance on the ongoing task but made it easier for older versus younger adults.
On the contrary, smaller age-related declines in studies with vs. without ongoing task age confounds favoring older adults (e.g., easier ongoing tasks for older adults) suggest that retrieval of the plan requires cognitive resources and is anything but automatic, obligatory, or reflexive.
Although we did not observe differential deficits across PM tasks in individuals with aMCI, the use of different ongoing tasks for the two activity-based PM trials (PAL or verbal fluency test) and for four other PM trials (mathematics problem test) might complicate direct comparison of PM tasks because differences in the cognitive demands of the ongoing task may affect PM performance.
Contemporary neuropsychological views define WM as the capacity to keep information 'on-line' as necessary for an ongoing task [ 23, 24].
Fifth, the current meta-analysis shows that for ProM proper with focal cues, age-related declines are large even though the ongoing task demands in most of these studies were zero as these studies did not include any resource demanding ongoing tasks.
The lack of age differences in ongoing task performance may mean many different things, for example, the easy ongoing task for older adults required very few resources, and even though older adults allocated more of their resources to prospective memory task than younger adults they still managed to match younger adults performance because the ongoing task was designed to be easier for them.
The designs with ongoing task confounds can answer only one question: what are age differences in prospective memory when these confounds are present, that is, when the ongoing task is made easier for older versus younger adults?
Our procedures for accomplishing this ongoing task include using the considerable expertise of our research ornithologists on staff, aided enormously by input from knowledgeable professional and amateur cooperators worldwide.
