Remembering the Future; Prospective Memory across the Autistic Adult's Life Span

Prospective memory helps us to remember to perform tasks in the future. Prospective memory can be either time or event based. The goal of this study was to determine time- and event-based prospective memory in autistic adults across the life span. Autistic (n = 82) and non-autistic (n = 111) adults, aged between 30 and 86 years, performed the lab-based Amsterdam Breakfast Task, and several naturalistic prospective memory tasks. Preregistered analyses (AsPredicted #34249) were performed using classical frequentist as well as Bayesian statistics. On none of the prospective memory tasks, group differences were observed. Our results show no effect of age on naturalistic tasks, but age did affect our lab-based measure, indicative of the age paradox often described in non-autistic adults. Moreover, we found evidence for a parallel age-related effect of lab-based and naturalistic prospective memory in autistic and non-autistic individuals.