Varying the importance of a prospective memory task: Differential effects across time - and event-based prospective memory

Abstract

Only few studies have addressed the issue of task importance in prospective memory. Most of them, but not all, have shown that perceived task importance does improve prospective memory performance. However, there is little understanding of (1) the conditions under which importance of the prospective memory task makes a difference in performance and (2) the mechanisms by which perceived task importance has an effect on prospective memory performance. The present study reports two experiments that manipulate task importance in a time-based and an event-based prospective memory paradigm. Results show that importance has an effect on the time-based but not on the event-based task. Further analyses of the performance in the cover tasks as well as the monitoring behaviour indicate that importance improves prospective memory to the degree the task requires the strategic allocation of attentional resources.

The demands of an ongoing activity influence the success of event-based prospective memory

“…In all of the conditions in this study in which event-based memory was worse, the participants should have been allocating more attention to the demands of the ongoing task, and this is especially true when judgments were switched randomly from trial to trial. The idea of overall attentional demands influencing event-based memory is consistent with manipulations of the relative importance of the event-based task (e.g., Kliegel, Martin, McDaniel, & Einstein, 2001). If the ongoing task is treated by participants as being more important, more resources will be devoted to it and prospective memory will suffer.…”

Implementation intention encoding does not automatize prospective memory responding

“…The idea here is that as the prospective memory task increases in importance, more available resources will be devoted to the prospective memory task, with concomitant improvements in performance (e.g., Kliegel, Martin, McDaniel, & Einstein, 2004). On this interpretation, ongoing task performances should also decline (for the implementation intention condition), since resources will be reallocated from the ongoing tasks to the prospective memory task (see Kliegel, Martin, McDaniel, & Einstein, 2001. This pattern did not emerge, however.…”

Implementation intentions facilitate prospective memory under high attention demands

“…One idea is that requiring participants to state "When I see the word X, I will do Y" could create a strong social commitment to perform the action, and for this reason, implementation intention participants could have assigned a higher degree of importance to the prospective memory task. Augmenting the importance of a prospective memory task can increase prospective memory performance, but typically does so at the expense of other ongoing activities (Einstein et al, 2005;Kliegel, Martin, McDaniel, & Einstein, 2001. For our purposes, the implication is that participants with implementation intentions would have allocated controlled resources, or would have increased allocation in relation to the other conditions, to the prospective memory task, even in the presence of the demanding secondary task.…”