Abstract
Children with high working memory (WM) capacity and older in age were shown to perform better in prospective memory (PM) task for their ability to correctly discriminate targets and distractors. Furthermore, it is known that PM level of maturation influences scholar performance but also social behaviour and peer relationships, but teachers could not be aware of these limits in their pupils.
The present study aims at tracking the development of PM in scholar children (aged 8 and 12) and evaluating whether it is related to other cognitive, social and behavioural traits. A group of young adults (20-25) was used as control group. An event-based PM task consisted in pressing a key whenever a certain picture was presented, while performing a visuospatial-based probed recognition task (as ongoing activity), as a measure of WM updating. Moreover, a questionnaire assessing social adaptation was administered to both children (autoevaluation) and their teachers (eteroevaluation). Results mirrored those on developmental trajectory of PM due to age, but also showed a difference with respect to adults in the strategy used to cope with the WM updating task. Moreover, behavioural questionnaires outlined that teachers’ perception of social abilities in children was correlated to memory tasks performance.