Task interference in time-based, event-based, and dual intention prospective memory conditions

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Abstract

Forming the intention to complete an activity later is the standard definition of a prospective memory task. Recently, a debate has arisen concerning the degree to which near-term intentions usurp resources away from other ongoing activities. In four experiments the authors tested how much interference was caused by holding a variety of different intentions. In all but one case, possessing an intention to perform an activity later resulted in slowed decision latencies to a different, ongoing activity. Intentions that were well-specified interfered less than intentions that were more ill-specified. In dual intention conditions, evidence for subadditivity of interference was obtained, although not uniformly. In considering potential mechanisms that cause this interference, the explanation favored here is that people establish resource allocation policies based on their predictions of being able to successfully complete both the ongoing and prospective memory tasks.

Section snippets

Experiment 1

Three conditions were tested in this first experiment. One condition was given the intention to respond to words denoting an animal (e.g., tiger). Another condition was asked to respond after 4 and 8 min had elapsed in the ongoing task. To assess the amount of task interference that was caused by possessing these event-based category and time-based pulse intentions, respectively, a no intention control condition performed only the ongoing task. As just mentioned, the prevailing theories of

Experiment 2

The event-based intention used in Experiment 1 was categorical insofar as participants had to detect animal exemplars. This intention is less well-specified during intention formation than telling people the specific cues that they will encounter later (e.g., hit and nice). As noted earlier, Einstein et al. (1995) found better event-based prospective memory performance with a specific intention as compared with a categorical intention (also see Ellis & Milne, 1996). By contrast, the time-based

Experiment 3

The previous experiment discovered that the specificity of, rather than the type of, intention mediated the amount of slowing in the ongoing task. The goal of the next experiment was to assess whether multiple intentions would have an additive effect on task interference. For example, possessing a categorical event-based intention produced slowing in both Experiments 1 and 2, but we wanted to determine whether also asking participants to complete a time-based step or time-based pulse intention

Experiment 4

One residual issue with the foregoing experiments is that participants could be using the time after the offset of a letter string differently in the time-based and event-based conditions. More specifically, the time after the offset of a letter string and prior to the next trial could be functionally useful when holding a time-based intention whereas it would not be so with an event-based task. If the time-based intention comes to mind after a response is made, the interference effect with a

General discussion

We begin by summarizing the results from this study. First, all intentions caused task interference except the event-based intention with specific cues. Second, contrary to the prevailing claims that time-based intentions necessarily involve more self-initiated processing, time-based intentions did not generally result in greater interference to the ongoing task. Third, the specificity of the intention appears to drive, in part, the amount of task interference that is produced rather than the

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    We thank Benjamin Martin, Eric Grissino, Chris Burns, Sarah Perpich, and Gene Brewer for their invaluable assistance in collecting the data.

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