Prospective memory (PM) enables people to remember to complete important tasks in the future. Failing to do so can result in consequences of varying severity. Here, we investigated how PM error-consequence severity impacts the neural processing of relevant cues for triggering PM and the ramification of that processing on the associated prospective task performance. Participants role-played a cafeteria worker serving lunches to fictitious students and had to remember to deliver an alternative lunch to students (as PM cues) who would otherwise (...) experience a moderate or severe aversive reaction. Scalp-recorded, event-related potential (ERP) measures showed that the early-latency frontal positivity, reflecting the perception-based neural responses to previously learned stimuli, did not differ between the severe versus moderate PM cues. In contrast, the longer-latency parietal positivity, thought to reflect full PM cue recognition and post retrieval processes, was elicited earlier by the severe than the moderate PM cues. This faster instantiation of the parietal positivity to the severe-consequence PM cues was then followed by faster and more accurate behavioral responses. These findings indicate how the relative importance of a PM can be neurally instantiated in the form of enhanced and faster PM cue recognition and processing and culminate into better PM. (shrink)

In our daily lives, we continuously evaluate feedback information, update our knowledge, and adapt our behavior in order to reach desired goals. This ability to learn from feedback information, however, declines with age. Previous research has indicated that certain higher-level learning processes, such as feedback evaluation, integration of feedback information, and updating of knowledge, seem to be affected by age, and recent studies have shown how the adaption of choice behavior following feedback can differ with age. The neural mechanisms underlying (...) this age-related change in choice behavior during learning, however, remain unclear. The aim of this study is therefore to investigate the relation between learning-related neural processes and choice behavior during feedback learning in two age groups. Behavioral and fMRI data were collected, while a group of young and older adults performed a probabilistic learning task consisting of 10 blocks of 20 trials each. On each trial, the participants chose between a house and a face, after which they received visual feedback. In each block, either the house or the face image had a higher probability of yielding a reward. Participants were instructed to try to maximize their gains. Our results showed that less successful learning in older adults, as indicated by a lower learning rate, corresponded with a higher tendency to switch to the other stimulus option, and with a reduced adaptation of this switch choice behavior following positive feedback. At the neural level, activation following positive and negative feedback was found to be less distinctive in the older adults, due to a smaller feedback-evaluation response to positive feedback in this group. Furthermore, whereas young adults displayed increased levels of knowledge updating prior to adapting choice behavior, we did not find this effect in older adults. Together, our results suggest that diminished learning performance with age corresponds with diminished evaluation of positive feedback and reduced knowledge updating related to changes in choice behavior, indicating how such differences in feedback processing at the trial level in older adults might lead to reduced learning performance across trials. (shrink)