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Abstract
Objectives:To assess the sensitivity of patients who suffered a severe closed-head injury to the manipulation of attentional resources and encoding instructions during the execution of prospective memory tasks.Material and Methods:A group of patients with chronic sequelae of severe closed-head injury and a group of matched normal controls were given an experimental procedure for the assessment of time-based and event-based prospective memory. Availability of attentional resources at the time of intention recall and encoding conditions at the time of giving instructions were varied across experimental sessions.Results:The simultaneous execution of a concurrent task was more detrimental to accuracy in the spontaneous recall of the prospective intention in the post-traumatic than in the normal control group. Moreover, the instruction to encode more extensively by rehearsing aloud and mentally imaging the actions to be performed at the time of the study improved recall accuracy more in the post-traumatic than in the normal control group.Conclusions:Based on these data, we suggest that a prospective memory deficit in post-traumatic patients is due, among other things, to reduced availability of attentional resources and to poor encoding of actions to be performed.
Highlights
The term prospective memory (PM) refers to the ability to comply with the previously established intention to perform some action at a specified time or when a specific event occurs
Unlike tasks of declarative memory, in which the examiner prompts the experimental subject to initiate retrieval of the studied items at the appropriate time, in a typical PM task the subject has to encode the association between a specific event or time and performance of the intended actions
We excluded patients from the experimental sample if they had a history of alcohol or drug abuse, psychiatric or neurological symptoms preceding the head trauma, coma duration of less than 3 days, and if they were unable to attend the experimental procedures because their language, motor, or attentional deficits were too severe
Summary
The term prospective memory (PM) refers to the ability to comply with the previously established intention to perform some action at a specified time (e.g., at five o’ clock; time-based PM task) or when a specific event occurs (e.g., when a particular person is encountered; event-based PM task). Unlike tasks of declarative memory, in which the examiner prompts the experimental subject to initiate retrieval of the studied items at the appropriate time, in a typical PM task the subject has to encode the association between a specific event or time and performance of the intended actions. When the event occurs or the time expires he has to rely exclusively on his own initiative to perform the intended actions. This implies that two cognitive components are critical for the correct delayed execution of planned actions: i) a more typically prospective
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