Prospective Memory in Context

Improving children's ability to remember intentions: a literature review on strategies to improve prospective memory during childhood

Children often fail to remember executing intentions because prospective memory (PM) does not completely develop until late adolescence or young adulthood. PM failures are often observed in children and can have negative consequences on their everyday lives. Thus, in the last 50 years, various strategies to support children's PM have been designed and evaluated, such as prompting children to use different encoding modalities, such as verbal, visual, and enacted modalities, or encoding strategies, such as implementation intentions, episodic future thinking (EFT), and performance predictions, as well as providing children with verbal and visual reminders. However, not all these interventions have shown to efficiently enhance PM performance during childhood. The present literature review is aimed at summarizing these interventions and critically examining their effectiveness from a developmental perspective and by considering underlying mechanisms. The type of PM task (event-, time-, and activity-based), cognitive resource demands, and processing overlaps are also considered. Finally, directions for future research and possible applications in everyday life will be discussed.

Strategic monitoring improves prospective memory: A meta-analysis

Monitoring the environment for target events that trigger prospective memory (PM) retrieval requires cognitive resources, reflected by costs to ongoing task performance (i.e., worse accuracy and/or slower response times). Strategic monitoring refers to the use of context to engage or disengage monitoring when a PM target is anticipated or unanticipated. Laboratory strategic monitoring studies have found mixed results as to whether context specification improves PM performance. This study employed a meta-analytic technique to assess the overall effect of context specification on PM performance and ongoing task metrics of strategic monitoring. Overall, context specification improved PM performance when the target was anticipated and improved ongoing task performance (speed and accuracy) when the target was not anticipated. Moderator analyses revealed the degree of slowing in anticipated contexts predicted how much context specification improved PM performance. However, the benefits to PM performance from context specification differed by the type of procedure used. PM performance was improved when context changes could be predicted during blocked or proximity procedures, but not when context varied randomly in trial-level procedures. These results provide insights into the mechanisms underlying strategic monitoring and guidance for researchers on which procedures to be use depending on the theory-driven questions.

Aging and strategic prospective memory monitoring

Monitoring the environment for the occurrence of prospective memory (PM) targets is a resource-demanding process that produces cost (e.g., slowing) to ongoing activities. Prior research has shown that older adults are able to monitor strategically, which involves the activation of monitoring when contextually appropriate and deactivation of monitoring when it is not thereby affording conservation of limited-capacity attentional resources. However, the time course and efficiency with which these processes operate with increased age are unknown. In the current study, participants performed an ongoing lexical decision task in which words/nonwords were blocked by font color in sets of ten trials (ten red trials followed by ten blue trials). Importantly, participants were informed that PM targets ("TOR" syllable) would only occur in red trials. Replicating previous work, both younger and older adults were successfully able to disengage monitoring upon encountering the unexpected (i.e., blue) context. However, while younger adults completely disengaged monitoring in the unexpected context, older adults continued to show monitoring across the majority of trials. Additionally, younger, but not older, adults showed a re-engagement of monitoring at the end of the unexpected context in preparation for the upcoming expected context. These findings suggest that while strategic monitoring generally remains intact with increased age, the disengagement and preparatory re-engagement of strategic monitoring may operate less optimally for older adults.

Context cue focality influences strategic prospective memory monitoring

Monitoring the environment for the occurrence of prospective memory (PM) targets is a resource-demanding process that produces cost (e.g., slower responding) to ongoing activities. However, research suggests that individuals are able to monitor strategically by using contextual cues to reduce monitoring in contexts in which PM targets are not expected to occur. In the current study, we investigated the processes supporting context identification (i.e., determining whether or not the context is appropriate for monitoring) by testing the context cue focality hypothesis. This hypothesis predicts that the ability to monitor strategically depends on whether the ongoing task orients attention to the contextual cues that are available to guide monitoring. In Experiment 1, participants performed an ongoing lexical decision task and were told that PM targets (TOR syllable) would only occur in word trials (focal context cue condition) or in items starting with consonants (nonfocal context cue condition). In Experiment 2, participants performed an ongoing first letter judgment (consonant/vowel) task and were told that PM targets would only occur in items starting with consonants (focal context cue condition) or in word trials (nonfocal context cue condition). Consistent with the context cue focality hypothesis, strategic monitoring was only observed during focal context cue conditions in which the type of ongoing task processing automatically oriented attention to the relevant features of the contextual cue. These findings suggest that strategic monitoring is dependent on limited-capacity processing resources and may be relatively limited when the attentional demands of context identification are sufficiently high.

Eye movements provide insights into the conscious use of context in prospective memory

Prior research examining the impact of context on prospective memory (PM) has produced mixed results. Our study aimed to determine whether providing progressive context information could increase PM accuracy and reduce costs to ongoing tasks. Seventy-two participants made ongoing true/false judgements for simple sentences while maintaining a PM intention to respond differently to four memorised words. The context condition were informed of the trial numbers where PM targets could appear, and eye-tracking recorded trial number fixation frequency. The context condition showed reduced costs during irrelevant contexts, increased costs during relevant contexts, and had better PM accuracy compared to a standard condition that was not provided with context. The context condition also made an increasing number of trial number fixations leading up to relevant contexts, indicating the conscious use of context. Furthermore, this trial number checking was beneficial to PM, with participants who checked more frequently having better PM accuracy.