Abstract
Mixed prospective memory (MPM) needs to be executed when both external time and event cues appear. According to the clarity of time cues, MPM can be further divided into two types: time-point MPM and time-period MPM. There is no research on these two types of MPM. Whether existing theories of EBPM can explain its processing mechanisms is worth exploring. The current study was aimed at examining the differences in attentional allocation characteristics between these two types of MPM and EBPM under different difficult ongoing tasks. The results showed that the attention consumption of the two types of MPM groups was less than that of the EBPM group in the early and middle stages of high cognitive load, but there was no difference between the three groups in the later stage of the task. The attention distribution of time-point MPM and time-period MPM displayed dynamic changes: the time-point MPM only had attention consumption in the later stage, while the time-period MPM also existed in the early and middle stages. These results support dynamic multiprocess theory.
Highlights
The ability to remember to fulfill an intention at a certain point in the future is referred to as prospective memory (PM; Einstein and McDaniel, 1990)
By manipulating the clarity of PM cues and the difficulty of ongoing tasks, this study examined whether there were differences between the processing mechanism of mixed prospective memory (MPM) and event-based prospective memory (EBPM) along with the attention characteristics of two different types of MPM during the execution of PM tasks
The results showed that the performance of the time-point MPM was better than that of the time-period MPM and EBPM
Summary
The ability to remember to fulfill an intention at a certain point in the future is referred to as prospective memory (PM; Einstein and McDaniel, 1990). Event-based prospective memory needs to be implemented when there are clear cues from the outside (for example, remembering to buy bread when passing through the bakery). Time-based prospective memory needs to be performed at a specific time without clear external cues (for example, remembering to have a meeting at 3 o’clock tomorrow afternoon). Repeated TBPM tasks have obvious external cues due to highly planned living arrangements (for example, a person should remind her diabetic mothers to take insulin at 11 o’clock, and, at this time, she usually picks up the child at the school gate). A large part of our lives consists of PM tasks that have both time and event cues Such a PM task is called mixed prospective memory (MPM; Block and Zakay, 2006)
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