The role of temporal delay and repeated prospective memory cue exposure on the deactivation of completed intentions

Abstract

Previous studies have shown that completed prospective memory (PM) intentions entail aftereffects in terms of ongoing-task-performance decrements in trials containing repeated PM cues which previously served as PM cues triggering the intended action. Previous research reported that PM aftereffects decrease over time, thus revealing a specific time course of PM aftereffects. In the present study, we tested two accounts for this pattern, assuming either that the decline of aftereffects is related to the temporal distance to PM task completion or may be a result of the repeated exposure of repeated PM cues in the ongoing task. In three experiments, we manipulated both the temporal distance to PM task completion and the frequency of repeated PM cues and demonstrated that aftereffects of completed intentions declined with repeated exposure of formerly relevant PM cues. In addition, effects of repeated exposure were not only limited to the repetition of specific PM-cue exemplars but also generalized to other semantically related PM cues within the PM-cue category. Together, findings show that decreased aftereffects of completed intentions are not related to the temporal duration of the subsequent test block, but crucially depend on the repeated exposure of the previously relevant PM cues.

Intention Retrieval and Deactivation Following an Acute Psychosocial Stressor

“…Similar to previous studies, subjective consequences of TSST exposure died away relatively fast after cessation of the stressor, whereas neuroendocrine responses to stress were still present after 50 minutes [ 20 , 41 ]. Second, cognitive results also showed the predicted outcome: PM accuracy was within the normal range for PM studies (i.e., no ceiling effect occurred) and RTs and error rates were increased for PM REPEATED trials compared to standard trials, indicating aftereffects of completed intentions [ 3 , 4 ]. Most strikingly, however, despite a strong biological and subjective stress response and standard effects in the cognitive task, stress did not exert any influence on PM performance, ongoing-task performance, and aftereffects of completed intentions.…”

“…The ability to remember to perform an intended action after some delay in the future is known as prospective memory (PM), which requires the retrieval of an intended action in the absence of a direct instruction, either at a pre-specified point of time (i.e., time-based PM) or to the appearance of an external mnemonic cue (i.e., PM cue; event-based PM) [ 1 ]. In addition to that, intention representations need to be deactivated once the intended action has been completed in order to prevent interference of completed intention representations with subsequent task performance [ 2 – 4 ]. Given continuous increase of work intensity in modern society, for example, high working speed and tight deadlines [ 5 ] with general increased numbers of workflow interruptions [ 6 ], it is surprising that the reliability of PM functioning in everyday life of healthy subjects has only recently attracted research in the scientific community, for example, with respect to mood states [ 7 ] or sleep disturbances [ 8 ].…”

Commission errors in delay–execute prospective memory tasks

“…To investigate the effect of finished or cancelled instructions, researchers compare reaction times to PM targets and matched control words. Longer reaction times for PM targets are interpreted as a failure to deactivate the related intention (Cohen, Dixon, & Lindsay, 2005;Scullin, Bugg, McDaniel, & Einstein, 2011;Walser et al, 2012;Walser, Plessow, Goschke, & Fischer, 2014). A further dependent variable is actual commission errors Bugg, Scullin, & McDaniel, 2013;Pink & Dodson, 2013;Scullin et al, 2012).…”

Forgetting no-longer-relevant prospective memory intentions is (sometimes) harder with age but easier with forgetting practice.

“…This approach seemed preferable to comparing experiments by converting the average number of commission errors to the average proportion of commission errors, because some evidence suggests that the aftereffects of PM intentions decrease with repeated exposure to previously relevant PM targets(Walser, Plessow, Goschke, & Fischer, 2014). Note that the difference between the length of the finished PM phases in Experiment 1 versus Experiment 2 (and 3) was irrelevant to the analysis of the number of participants who made a commission error, because all participants who made an error in Experiment 1 did so within the first four trials.…”