Fan effects in event-based prospective memory

Three experiments investigated whether event-based prospective memory was affected by the associative fan of the cues to be detected. The associative fan was operationally defined as the number of associates paired with event-based cues in a paired associate learning phase. Subsequent to the paired associate learning, participants were given a lexical decision task in which event-based cues were embedded. The results from Experiments 1 and 2 confirmed that a larger associative fan significantly reduced event-based cue detection. The third experiment confirmed that the absolute strength of an association does not affect performance, rather the number of associations does. As an ancillary issue, the authors tested whether cue detection was affected by the familiarity of the background words used in the lexical decision task. No consistent evidence for a discrepancy plus search model of prospective memory was found.