Thought probes during prospective memory encoding: Evidence for perfunctory processes

Abstract

For nearly 50 years, psychologists have studied prospective memory, or the ability to execute delayed intentions. Yet, there remains a gap in understanding as to whether initial encoding of the intention must be elaborative and strategic, or whether some components of successful encoding can occur in a perfunctory, transient manner. In eight studies (N = 680), we instructed participants to remember to press the Q key if they saw words representing fruits (cue) during an ongoing lexical decision task. They then typed what they were thinking and responded whether they encoded fruits as a general category, as specific exemplars, or hardly thought about it at all. Consistent with the perfunctory view, participants often reported mind wandering (42.9%) and hardly thinking about the prospective memory task (22.5%). Even though participants were given a general category cue, many participants generated specific category exemplars (34.5%). Bayesian analyses of encoding durations indicated that specific exemplars came to mind in a perfunctory manner rather than via strategic, elaborative mechanisms. Few participants correctly guessed the research hypotheses and changing from fruit category cues to initial-letter cues eliminated reports of specific exemplar generation, thereby arguing against demand characteristics in the thought probe procedure. In a final experiment, encoding duration was unrelated to prospective memory performance; however, specific-exemplar encoders outperformed general-category encoders with no ongoing task monitoring costs. Our findings reveal substantial variability in intention encoding, and demonstrate that some components of prospective memory encoding can be done “in passing.”

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

“…The need for engaging in such constructive and slow, effortful processes (depicted as “Deliberate Future Thinking 1” in Figure 2) may occur in more complex situations involving competing demands, motivational conflicts, or when planning a sequence of actions to achieve a superordinate goal (e.g., steps involved in planning a trip to a foreign country; see Kvavilashvili & Ellis, 1996). The main point of the model is that, although humans have the ability to engage in such constructive episodic future thinking processes (as demonstrated by numerous studies on deliberate episodic future thinking), the majority of everyday situations allow them to circumvent this initial stage and form their intentions quickly and without too much expenditure of effort and executive resources (e.g., see Scullin et al, 2018). Therefore, such decisions about the future can often occur “on the go” while being engaged in other activities such as driving, jogging, or doing washing up (Anderson & McDaniel, 2019).…”

“…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).…”

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

“…However, the correspondence may not be perfect. For example, in categorical conditions participants may generate exemplars (Scullin et al, 2018), effectively turning nonfocal into focal tasks. Therefore, we use the theoretically neutral terms 'single-item' and 'category' here.…”

They forgot their “baby”?!: Factors that lead students to forget their cell phone

“…The authors concluded that "the conscious formation of an intention may not always be necessary for successful remembering as stipulated in the prospective memory literature" (p. 873). More recently, Scullin et al (2018) probed the thoughts of 680 participants during the encoding of PM intentions in 8 experiments and found that participants frequently reported mind wandering, "hardly thinking about the PM task", or engaging in idiosyncratic, "perfunctory" processes rather than following the experimenter's explicit instructions. The authors summarized their results by concluding that participants often encode PM intentions with little effort, that variability in encoding effort often has little effect on PM remembering, and that PM intentions are often encoded "in passing".…”