‘If-then’ but when? Effects of implementation intentions on children’s and adolescents’ prospective memory

Abstract Prospective memory (PM), the ability to initiate and implement delayed intentions, increases across childhood and adolescence. Previous evidence on older adults indicated beneficial effects of implementation intentions (an encoding strategy) on individuals’ PM performance; especially when cognitive control demands were high and availability of cognitive resources low. This research program set out to investigate the impact of implementation intentions on children’s and adolescents’ PM while simultaneously varying cognitive control demands of the PM paradigm. Across two studies, implementation intention encoding was contrasted with standard encoding. In addition, Study 1 manipulated…