Prospective remembering in younger and older adults: Role of the prospective cue

In these studies, adult age differences in event-based prospective memory were examined using an adapted version of G.O. Einstein and M.A. McDaniel's (1990) task. In Experiments 13, we varied prospective cue specificity by assigning a specific target word or an unspecified word drawn from a given taxonomic category. In Experiment 3, we manipulated cue typicality by presenting low or high typicality target words. Results yielded positive effects of cue specificity on prospective performance. Age effects occurred when high typicality target words served as prospective cues (Exps. 1 and 3), but younger and older adults performed comparably with moderate and low typicality words (Exps. 2 and 3). Hierarchical regression analyses indicated that age accounted for a small but significant amount of variance in prospective memory, although the contribution of age was substantially reduced after statistically controlling for recognition memory. Implications of these data for current views on prospective remembering are discussed.     

Prospective memory and aging: preserved spontaneous retrieval,but impaired deactivation,in older adults

Prospective remembering is partially supported by cue-driven spontaneous retrieval processes. We investigated spontaneous retrieval processes in younger and older adults by presenting prospective memory target cues during a lexical decision task following instructions that the prospective memory task was finished. Spontaneous retrieval was inferred from slowed lexical decision responses to target cues (i.e., intention interference). When the intention was finished, younger adults efficiently deactivated their intention, but the older adults continued to retrieve their intentions. Levels of inhibitory functioning were negatively associated with intention interference in the older adult group, but not in the younger adult group. These results indicate that normal aging might not compromise spontaneous retrieval processes but that the ability to deactivate completed intentions is impaired.     

Prospective remembering in younger and older adults: role of the prospective cue

In these studies, adult age differences in event-based prospective memory were examined using an adapted version of G.O. Einstein and M.A. McDaniel's (1990) task. In Experiments 1-3, we varied prospective cue specificity by assigning a specific target word or an unspecified word drawn from a given taxonomic category. In Experiment 3, we manipulated cue typicality by presenting low or high typicality target words. Results yielded positive effects of cue specificity on prospective performance. Age effects occurred when high typicality target words served as prospective cues (Exps. 1 and 3), but younger and older adults performed comparably with moderate and low typicality words (Exps. 2 and 3). Hierarchical regression analyses indicated that age accounted for a small but significant amount of variance in prospective memory, although the contribution of age was substantially reduced after statistically controlling for recognition memory. Implications of these data for current views on prospective remembering are discussed.     

Whoops, I did it again: commission errors in prospective memory

Prospective memory research almost exclusively examines remembering to execute an intention, but the ability to forget completed intentions may be similarly important. We had younger and older adults perform a prospective memory task (press Q when you see corn or dancer) and then told them that the intention was completed. Participants later performed a lexical-decision task (Phase 2) in which the prospective memory cues reappeared. Initial prospective memory performance was similar between age groups, but older adults were more likely than younger adults to press Q during Phase 2 (i.e., commission errors). This study provides the first experimental demonstration of event-based prospective memory commission errors after all prospective memory tasks are finished and identifies multiple factors that increase risk for commission errors.     

Implementation intention encoding does not automatize prospective memory responding

An implementation intention encoding, one that specifies the concrete situation that is appropriate for initiating an intended action and links that situational cue to the intended action, has been shown to improve prospective memory. One proposed mechanism is that implementation intentions create automatized prospective remembering. This view anticipates that implementation intentions should prevent prospective memory decline in highly cognitively demanding situations. Contrary to this expectation, although implementation intention encoding enhanced prospective memory (Experiments 1 and 2), implementation-intention encoding did not buffer against significant prospective memory decline in high-cognitive-demand conditions (Experiments 1–3), and in Experiment 3, implementation intention encoding produced lower levels of prospective memory performance than did behavioral practice in the high-cognitive-demand situation. We suggest that although implementation intentions may stimulate a strong associative encoding (between an anticipated environmental cue and an intended action), that encoding does not support a completely automatized prospective memory response.     

Prospective Memory and Divided Attention

In three experiments, we manipulated the processing demands of a concurrent task to test the hypothesis that an event-based prospective memory task satisfies a criterion of automaticity proposed by Hasher and Zacks (1979). As in the previous studies, a prospective memory task (pressing a key whenever a target word was presented) was embedded within a short-term memory task (remembering seven words). In addition, participants performed a concurrent memory task which varied in difficulty. Participants repeated either 0 to 6 randomly generated digits or a single word. In all three experiments, short-term memory performance was influenced by the concurrent memory load. Prospective performance, in contrast, was not affected by the memory load even though an attempt was made to increase the difficulty of the prospective task by manipulating the specificity of the target instructions (Experiment 2) and the number of target words (Experiments 2 and 3). The results are discussed within the framework of automatic processing.     

The Compensatory Role of Implementation Intentions for Young Adults with Low Working Memory Capacity

Many factors improve prospective memory performance both inside and outside of the laboratory, including the detailed planning of the situational cue and intended action (i.e., implementation intentions). In the current study, we obtained measures of working memory capacity and laboratory event‐based prospective memory performance in college‐aged adults. Half of our participants formed an implementation intention in the prospective memory task. Because of evidence that implementation intentions increase the encoding/retrieval efficiency of the prospective memory, it was predicted that forming an implementation intention would serve as a compensatory strategy for those with low working memory ability. Our results supported this hypothesis in that working memory capacity no longer correlated with prospective memory performance when participants employed an implementation intention encoding strategy. These findings suggest that implementation intentions may be an effective way for individuals with low working memory capacity to improve their performance in an attentionally demanding prospective memory task. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Remembering intentions: testing a new method of investigation

The paper examines some of the methodological difficulties associated with the investigation of remembering intentions in a laboratory and reports the development of a new and easily administered naturalistic task. The task requires participants to act as a narrator and read aloud a story that they are informed will help the experimenter to obtain necessary test material for another study. Remembering intentions (‘prospective memory’) is examined by presenting a plausible cover story requiring to make a correct substitution for a ‘target’ word which appears on several occasions during the story. This method seems to capture adequately the nature of prospective remembering and preclude the occurrence of ceiling, floor and practice effects in performance. By distinguishing late responses from on-time or successful prospective memory responses it also stresses the importance of taking into account the speed with which one recovers from his or her prospective memory failures. Finally, this task enables us to collect reliable and consistent quantitative measures of remembering intentions and to investigate a variety of methodologically and theoretically important problems. The results of Experiments 1a and 1b (Study 1) suggest that both the type of prospective memory task (main versus extra) and subjects' awareness of the phenomenon under investigation are important influences on performance. On the other hand, no effects of (1) a short 5-minute delay between prospective memory instruction and onset of background activity and (2) information about the frequency of target word were revealed (Study 2). The design of a popular experimental paradigm (Einstein and McDaniel, 1990) is examined in the light of these findings. Copyright © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The difficulty of letting go: moderators of the deactivation of completed intentions

Recent studies showed that prospective memory (PM) intentions might not be deactivated directly after completion. The residual activation leads to aftereffects which are reflected as interference in performance when former PM cues of old intentions are interspersed in the new task (i.e., intention deactivation failure, Walser et al., J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn 38(4):1030–1044, 2012). In the present study, we investigated potential mechanisms that might support the deactivation process of completed intentions by manipulating the task demands (e.g., working memory load) between intention completion and measurement of aftereffects. Aftereffects on repeated PM-cue trials were found when working memory load was low (control condition), but were reduced when available resources were sparse (working memory load condition). When participants were asked to reflect upon the to-be-deactivated PM cue, subsequent aftereffects were increased. Further, overall aftereffects were larger for participants low in self-reported action control. Results show that the nature of the filler-task activity determines whether the representation of the completed intention is destabilized (working memory load) or strengthened (intention reflection). The (at least partial) overwriting of completed intention representations by new working memory task representations seems therefore to reflect a supporting factor for the deactivation of completed intentions.     

Implementation intentions facilitate prospective memory under high attention demands

An implementation intention is a planning technique that involves specifying a situation for initiating an intended action and linking these specific cues to the intention. In two experiments with young adults, we found significant increases in prospective memory with implementation intentions. With an implementation intention, but not with standard instructions, prospective memory performance was maintained under demanding attentional conditions (Experiment 2). Ongoing task performance did not decline, however, in relation with a no prospective memory control. Positive effects were not observed when the imagery component of the implementation intention was isolated from the verbal component. We suggest that implementation intention planning (relative to standard instructions) increases the likelihood that people will encode a robust associative link between the target cue and the intended action, thereby promoting reflexive triggering of the intended action on presentation of the target cue.     

Strengthening encoding via implementation intention formation increases prospective memory commission errors

Prospective memory refers to the ability to remember to execute future intentions (e.g., taking medication with dinner). Although most prior research on prospective memory errors has focused on omission errors (i.e., failures to perform an intention in response to a target cue), there has been a recent surge in research on commission errors, the erroneous performance of a finished intention. Existing studies have examined factors at retrieval that lead to commission errors; the present study extends this research by investigating the impact of encoding strength. We found that relative to standard encoding, implementation intention encoding doubled the risk of commission errors in our laboratory paradigm for both young and older adults. This novel finding demonstrates the impact of encoding strength on commission errors and documents the potential challenges of deactivating the effects of implementation intentions upon completion of a prospective memory task.     

Individual differences in intention initiation under demanding conditions: Interactive effects of state vs. action orientation and enactment difficulty

The present research examines individual differences in intention initiation. State- compared to action-oriented persons show an intention superiority effect for the cognitive representation of intentions [Goschke, T., & Kuhl, J. (1993). Representation of intentions: Persisting activation in memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 19, 1211–1226], but at the same time have a paradoxical deficit in initiating and carrying them out under demanding conditions. The present two experiments focus on intention initiation. Experiment 1 used a modified event-based paradigm of prospective memory, pre-cuing prospective actions with words varying in association to the target word. State-oriented participants had longer latencies in initiating uncued compared to precued actions under low-positive affect (high listlessness). In Experiment 2, we used a key-pressing task under high vs. low cognitive load (uncompleted vs. completed intention). State-oriented participants under high load had longer latencies when they chose by themselves which of two goals to pursue, compared to an External-Cue condition. Action-oriented participants showed efficient performance in each experiment. The intention-initiation deficit of state-oriented participants was related to higher levels of listlessness (first experiment) or to high load (second experiment) suggesting that motivational factors interact with volitional impairments. These results are interpreted in terms of Personality Systems Interaction theory (Kuhl, 2000).     

Inhibition of return following instructions to remember and forget.

Inhibition of return (IOR) refers to slowed responding to a target that appears in the same rather than in a different location as a preceding peripheral onset cue. This study examined IOR as a function of whether the peripheral onset cue was a word that participants were directed to remember or forget. Using a modified item-method directed forgetting paradigm, words appeared one at a time to the left or right, followed by a remember or forget instruction. A target dot was then presented either in the same peripheral location as the preceding word or in a different location; participants made a speeded response to localize this target. Confirming compliance with the memory instructions, recall tests that alternated with blocks of IOR trials (Experiment 1) revealed few intrusions of to-be-forgotten words, and a final recognition test (Experiments 1 and 3) revealed more hits for to-be-remembered words than for to-be-forgotten words. Reaction times to the target dot revealed greater magnitude IOR following to-be-forgotten words than following to-be-remembered words (Experiments 1 and 3). Moreover, when compared to baseline IOR values (Experiment 2), it appeared that this difference resulted from a magnification of IOR following forget instructions and a reduction in IOR following remember instructions. These results demonstrate the usefulness of IOR as an index of memorial processes and suggest that attentional orienting may play a role in the remembering and forgetting of words presented in peripheral visual locations.     

Planning and realization of complex intentions in traumatic brain injury and normal aging

The realization of delayed intentions (i.e., prospective memory) is a highly complex process composed of four phases: intention formation, retention, re-instantiation, and execution. The aim of this study was to investigate if executive functioning impairments are related to problems in the formation, re-instantiation, and execution of a delayed complex intention. In this context, it was another aim of the study to investigate the executive functioning hypothesis of cognitive aging in prospective memory performance. It was, therefore, explored if age-related prospective memory decline leads to similar decrements in the process of prospective remembering as executive functioning-related decline in young patients with traumatic brain injury. A group of patients with traumatic brain injury with retrospective memory within normal limits but impaired executive functions, a group of healthy older and a group of healthy younger adults completed a complex prospective memory task that allows for the separate assessment of the four phases of the prospective memory process. All groups showed a similarly high performance in the intention retention phase, whereas the patients with deficits in executive functioning and the older participants performed worse than the healthy young participants in the intention formation, re-instantiation and execution phases. The importance of executive functioning for prospective remembering in traumatic brain injury and normal aging is discussed.     

Memory for pro-social intentions: When competing motives collide

Memory for future actions, or prospective memory (PM), often involves remembering to do things for others. The present article explores the motivational mechanisms underlying memory for pro-social intentions through the manipulation of the social relevance of goals and presence of material rewards during an activity-based PM task. Results revealed that memory for the intention was better under pro-social than under standard conditions. However, when a material reward was introduced under pro-social conditions, it had the detrimental effect of reducing prospective remembering. Ongoing task performance was faster under pro-social than under No PM and standard PM conditions and it was unrelated to PM performance. In addition, the outcome of the ratings of two independent groups of participants confirmed that people are not aware of the potential conflict between pro-social and self-gain motives. Taken together, these new findings extend current PM theories by suggesting a prominent role of latent motivational mechanisms in guiding memory for pro-social intentions.     

Time-of-day affects prospective memory differently in younger and older adults

The goal of this study was to investigate the impact of circadian arousal on prospective memory performance as a function of age. We tested a younger (18–34 years) and an older group (56–95 years) of participants on- and off-peak with regard to their circadian arousal patterns in a computer-based laboratory experiment. For the prospective memory task, participants had to press a particular key whenever specific target words appeared in an ongoing concreteness-judgment task. The results showed that prospective memory performance was better on- than off-peak in younger but not older participants. Younger participants consistently outperformed older participants in all conditions. We conclude that prospective remembering underlies time-of-day effects which most likely reflect controlled processes.     

The Role of Interruptions and Contextual Associations in Delayed‐Execute Prospective Memory

We conducted three experiments to examine the dynamics of a delayed‐execute prospective memory task involving task interruptions. In the delayed‐execute paradigm, participants must delay a response until some future condition is met. After an intention was formed to a salient cue, an interruption reduced prospective memory relative to a no‐interruption condition. Prospective memory for cues encountered during an interrupting task was worse than for cues occurring before an interruption, but the location of the cue in either the ongoing task or the interruption did not affect prospective memory. Importantly, reinstating the prevailing context after the interruption alleviated the negative influence of the interruption. Providing participants with information about the future context for making the delayed‐execute response also alleviated some of these deficits presumably because participants could encode more specific features of the performance context. These results highlight the potential importance of contextual associations and reminders in completing everyday intentions successfully. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

执行意向影响事件性前瞻记忆的加工机制

本研究旨在探究不同执行意向编码形式对前瞻记忆加工机制的影响是否存在差异。结果显示在低认知负荷下,混合编码效果最好,仅执行意向编码次之,标准编码效果最差,而在高认知负荷下三种编码效果无差异。眼动指标显示在低认知负荷下混合编码的注视点数量最多,总注视时间最长;在混合编码条件下进行中任务和前瞻记忆任务的总注视时间均长于仅执行意向编码和标准编码。结果说明,执行意向编码容易受认知负荷的影响;在低认知负荷下混合编码的被试对任务刺激进行更多的监控和加工,而仅执行意向编码促进前瞻记忆任务的自动化加工。     

The effect of cue-familiarity, cue-distinctiveness, and retention interval on prospective remembering

Five experiments investigated the effects of cue familiarity, cue distinctiveness, and retention interval on prospective remembering. Results showed that (1) performance in a prospective memory task is facilitated when the cue is unfamiliar and/or distinctive; and (2) it is impaired by 3-minutes' delay between the instructions and the task (Experiment 1). A beneficial effect of distinctiveness was also found when perceptual rather than semantic distinctiveness was tested (Experiment 2). Experiments 3 and 4 ruled out the hypotheses that “unfulfilled expectancy” of an event (i.e. non-appearance of the cue during training) (Experiment 3), or some sort of “habituation” in the target context (Experiment 4), may have caused the low performance observed in the delayed conditions. Finally, results from Experiment 5 showed that delay negatively affected prospective remembering when it was filled with either a demanding interpolated activity (practice in a STM task) or an undemanding motoric activity (repetitive hands movements). Unfilled delay and an undemanding verbal activity (counting) were found not to affect prospective memory. Implications for the mechanisms underlying prospective remembering are discussed.     

Learning is impaired by activated intentions

Two experiments examined the task interference that sometimes accrues from having an intention. In standard prospective memory tasks, latency is often slower to an ongoing task performed concurrently with having an intention than it is when no intention is given. If the locus of this slowing resulted from different attentional allocation policies in the two cases, we predicted that the process of learning a word list would be impaired if participants had an intention rather than if they did not. Four different event-based prospective memory tasks were used in Experiment 1 to demonstrate that worse free recall of a word list resulted when studied with a concurrent intention than with a control condition that had no intention. In that experiment, linking an intention to a distal context that was to occur after learning did not impair free recall. Two time-based tasks were used in Experiment 2 to demonstrate that possessing a time-based prospective memory also hinders learning, unless the intention is linked to a future context that is expected to occur after the study session. In the latter case, no impairment was obtained.