Abstract
Prospective memory (PM) enables people to remember to complete important tasks in the future. Failing to do so can result in consequences of varying severity. Here, we investigated how PM error-consequence severity impacts the neural processing of relevant cues for triggering PM and the ramification of that processing on the associated prospective task performance. Participants role-played a cafeteria worker serving lunches to fictitious students and had to remember to deliver an alternative lunch to students (as PM cues) who would otherwise experience a moderate or severe aversive reaction. Scalp-recorded, event-related potential (ERP) measures showed that the early-latency frontal positivity, reflecting the perception-based neural responses to previously learned stimuli, did not differ between the severe versus moderate PM cues. In contrast, the longer-latency parietal positivity, thought to reflect full PM cue recognition and post-retrieval processes, was elicited earlier by the severe than the moderate PM cues. This faster instantiation of the parietal positivity to the severe-consequence PM cues was then followed by faster and more accurate behavioral responses. These findings indicate how the relative importance of a PM can be neurally instantiated in the form of enhanced and faster PM-cue recognition and processing and culminate into better PM.
Highlights
People do not perform every intended task simultaneously
A one-way repeated measures ANOVA showed that accuracy was not statistically different across the severe Prospective memory (PM) cues (M = 0.91, SE = 0.02), moderate PM cues (M = 0.89, SE = 0.02), and learned controls (M = 0.91, SE = 0.02); F(2,80) = 1.86, p = 0.163, ηp2 = 0.04
The response times (RTs) for learned controls (M = 484 ms, SE = 10 ms) were much faster than RTs for PM cues (M = 747 ms, SE = 12 ms), t(40) = −16.91, p < 0.001, d = −2.64. These findings show a prospective task performance decrement, likely because of the additional neural and cognitive processes that are required for PM cue recognition, PM recall, and post-retrieval processes as well as processes involved in the preparation and execution of different motor responses
Summary
External cue that triggers PM recall and the associated PM task (Einstein and McDaniel 1990). Responses to severe and moderate PM cues did not differ, the findings would suggest that PM importance does not bias prospective task performance when top–down, block-wise strategies and processing demands as well as bottom–up stimulus valence are controlled. The sustained prospective positivity is thought to reflect PM cue recall as well as post-retrieval processes, such as the configuration and instantiation of the prospective task set (West and Wymbs 2004; Bisiacchi et al 2009; West 2011) This neural component has been shown to be more pronounced for PM cues than for perceptually similar PM cue lures (West et al 2001), even when the defining feature of the PM cue is conceptual rather than perceptual (Cousens et al 2015; Cruz et al 2016). The current work aimed at advancing understanding of how PM error-consequence severity impacts the cascade of cognitive and neural processes that support PM cue recognition and the subsequent prospective task performance
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