Characterising monitoring processes in event-based prospective memory: Evidence from pupillometry

Abstract

In event-based prospective memory (PM) paradigms, participants are engaged in an ongoing task (e.g. lexical decision) while maintaining an intention to produce a special response if they encounter pre-defined targets (e.g. animal words). This leads to slowed response times even on nontarget trials, which might be caused by: A) a periodic or intermittent process that occurs transiently to check whether the current stimulus is a target, and/or B) a sustained monitoring process maintained throughout task performance rather than being time-locked to stimulus presentation. These processes are hard to distinguish, seeing as the key difference between them occurs in the gap between trials. Processes occurring in these gaps cannot be measured directly by behavioural methods. Here we measured pupil size as a continuous index of intention-related processing in an event-based prospective memory task. Participants performed a lexical decision task while remembering intentions based on either specific target words or categories (e.g. animal words). In two experiments, response times were slowed during PM conditions. Pupil size was significantly increased in the category but not the specificword condition. This effect was sustained throughout task performance rather than occurring transiently when stimuli were presented. Therefore there was no evidence for a transient pupillometric response associated with nontarget checking, although there was a strong transient response when targets were presented in either PM condition. These results provide evidence for a sustained PM monitoring process that occurrs even in the gaps between trials.

Mobile pupillometry in manual assembly: A pilot study exploring the wearability and external validity of a renowned mental workload lab measure

“…In all, our results could not replicate seminal laboratory work on pupillometry (cf., Beatty & Kahneman, 1966;Hess & Polt, 1960;Kahneman et al, 1969; or more recently, Moyes, Sari-sarraf, & Gilbert, 2019) and highlights the challenges in reaching external validity. Research on driving (cf., Recarte & Nunes, 2003), air traffic control (cf., Ahlstrom & Friedman-berg, 2006) and, for instance, piloting (cf., Causse et al, 2016) and surgery performance (cf., Dalveren et al, 2018;Erridge et al, 2017) already made great strides in closing this gap.…”

The Processing Mechanisms of Two Types of Mixed Prospective Memory

“…Before the PM cue appears, cognitive resources only need to be invested in performing the ongoing task. Near the emergence of the PM cue, individuals will invest many cognitive resources to search and monitor the PM cue, and thus, their attention consumption will show dynamic changes ( Chen et al, 2010 ; Scullin et al, 2013 ; Moyes et al, 2019 ). Current PM research in a laboratory usually adopts the dual-task paradigm.…”

Distinct monitoring strategies underlie costs and performance in prospective memory

“…While the use of eye-tracking can provide a time-sensitive measure of overt monitoring, future work would benefit from larger samples and the measurement of individual differences in cognitive control abilities that contribute to PM (e.g., Zuber et al, 2019 ). Additionally, research on working memory (Mathôt, 2020 ) and prospective memory (Moyes et al, 2019 ) suggests that pupil size is responsive to cognitive load. Future eye-tracking work could greatly benefit from the combination of both pupillometry and fixation tracking to better describe how the maintenance of and monitoring for prospective intentions are carried out in different environments.…”