Article

The present study reports test-retest consistency of Virtual Week, a well-known
measure of prospective memory (PM) performance. PM is the memory associated with
carrying out actions at a specific moment in the future. Patients with
neurological disorders as well as healthy older adults often report PM
dysfunctions that affect their everyday living. In Experiment 1, 19 younger and
20 older adults undertook the standard version of Virtual Week (version A). Older
adults showed lower performance compared to younger participants. However, the
discrepancy between groups was eliminated at retest. Experiment 2 was conducted
to investigate if remembering of PM content determined the improvement observed
in older adults at retest in Experiment 1. To this end we created a parallel
version (version B) in which we varied the content of the PM actions. Fifty older
adults were assigned to one of the two experimental conditions: Version A at test
and version B at retest or vice versa (25 participants in each condition).
Results showed no group differences in PM performance between version A and
version B; moreover, no effect of test-retest was found. The study confirmed that
Virtual Week is a reliable measure of PM performance and also provided a new
parallel version that can be useful in clinical setting.

Langue : ANGLAIS