Dealing with prospective memory demands while performing an ongoing task: Shared processing, increased on-task focus, or both?

Abstract

Prospective memory (PM) is the cognitive ability to remember to fulfill intended action plans at the appropriate future moment. Current theories assume that PM fulfillment draws on attentional processes. Accordingly, pending PM intentions interfere with other ongoing tasks to the extent to which both tasks rely on the same processes. How do people manage the competition between PM and ongoing-task demands? Based on research relating mind wandering and attentional control (Kane & McVay, 2012), we argue that people may not only change the way they process ongoing-task stimuli when given a PM intention, but they may also engage in less off-task thinking than they otherwise would. That is, people focus more strongly on the tasks at hand and dedicate considerable conscious thought to the PM goal. We tested this hypothesis by asking subjects to periodically report on their thoughts during prototypical PM (and control) tasks. Task-unrelated thought rates dropped when participants performed an ongoing task while holding a PM intention versus performing the ongoing task alone (Experiment 1), even when PM demands were minimized (Experiment 2) and more so when PM execution was especially rewarded (Experiment 3). Our findings suggest that PM demands not only elicit a cost to ongoing-task processing, but they also induce a stronger on-task focus and promote conscious thoughts about the PM intention. (PsycINFO Database Record

On the Nature of Everyday Prospection: A Review and Theoretical Integration of Research on Mind-Wandering, Future Thinking, and Prospective Memory

“…Positive effects of intention rehearsal during the retrieval phase have been found in most laboratory studies of prospective memory (Einstein et al, 1995; Guynn et al, 1998; Harris & Wilkins, 1982; Kvavilashvili, 1987; Rummel et al, 2017; Taylor et al, 2004). However, one could argue that the results may not generalize to real-life situations with much longer delay intervals (hours, days, weeks) compared with minutes typically used in laboratory tasks.…”

“…In summary, the proposed pragmatic dual process model may provide a useful initial framework for studying the nature and mechanisms of everyday prospection. This model and the review of relevant studies indicate that the progress in the study of naturally occurring prospective thought can only be achieved by more collaborative approach, and by adopting methods across different research fields to creatively address new research questions, which can result in novel findings and further increase our understanding of everyday prospection (e.g., Rummel et al, 2017; Scullin et al, 2018; Seli, Smilek, et al, 2018).…”

Strategic attention and decision control support prospective memory in a complex dual-task environment

“…We expect environments with multiple PM tasks and intention-updating to be even more demanding than our task and to therefore elicit greater effects on the attentional system than seen here. Another possibility with less-demanding tasks is that, as demands increase, participants may simultaneously increase their effort toward both the ongoing and PM tasks due to focusing more on the entire task ensemble (Rummel, Smeekens, & Kane, 2017). In the model this would be reflected by concurrent increases in both ongoing task quality and PM accumulation rate.…”

Mind-wandering as a natural kind: A family-resemblances view

“…categorized (by participants or independent raters) based on established or novel dimensions of interest. Although open-ended reports can present interpretive challenges (such as requiring verbalization of potentially non-verbalizable experiences, reporting deeply personal thoughts, or"punishing" mind-wandering reports by making them more effortful than on-task reports), they have been successfully employed in some studies examining the temporal focus of mindwandering[51,52]. Collecting large corpuses of open-ended reports would allow text-mining techniques to reveal novel and potentially unknown dimensions of the mind-wandering state.A family-resemblances approach might also increase the intellectual-if not methodological-connections among related phenomena that some might consider nonprototypical mind-wandering, such as spontaneous autobiographical semantic memories, earworms, depressive rumination, and so forth.…”