Study On The Dynamic Processes Of Event-Based Prospective Memory And Potential Influence Factors

Prospective memory(PM)refers to the ability to remember to carry out the formed intended actions at a certain point or situation in the future.As an important ability to perform planned tasks,prospective memory is crucial to people’s daily life,work,and even learning.Prospective memory and its processing mechanism have always been focused on by researchers.Researchers have conducted extensive research on whether the processing of prospective memory depends on cognitive resources.They proposed that spontaneous retrieval or strategic monitoring is the basis of the processing of prospective memory.Some mainstream theories of prospective memory have also been proposed to explain their processing mechanisms from different perspectives.However,they mainly claimed the separation of spontaneous retrieval and strategic monitoring or the rigid combination of the two.So far,prospective memory research has mainly revealed its "static processing" characteristics,but ignored the flexible changes in the process of prospective memory,that is,the dynamic processing characteristics.The newly proposed dynamic multiprocess view has pointed out that there is an dynamic interplay between strategic monitoring and spontaneous retrieval process in prospective memory,rather than independent process of each other,which dynamically adjusted by environment and individual differences(Sculling et al.,2013;Gilbert et al.,2013).However,so far,the dynamic processes of prospective memory have only been preliminarily explored.The dynamic processes of prospective memory and its underlying cognitive and neural mechanisms need to be further explored.In the processing of prospective memory,the features of context and cues and metacognition are key factors that affect the spontaneous retrieval and strategic monitoring of prospective memory.Therefore,this study systematically examined the dynamic processes and mechanism of prospective memory in six experiments from three aspects: the characteristics of context,metacognition,and cue utilization with the comprehensive use of behavioral experiments,event-related potential and eye tracking technology.The first study explored the role of context characteristics in the dynamic processing of prospective memory from the perspective of context expectation(Experiment 1)and task variability(Experiment 2)with the event-related potential and eye tracking technology.Two experiments were conducted to investigate the dependence of the dynamic process of prospective memory on the characteristics of context and the characteristics of dynamic interplay between spontaneous retrieval and strategic monitoring of prospective memory in the situations of complex and variable task.The second study explored the role of metacognition in the dynamic process of prospective memory by manipulating the performance prediction of prospective memory based on the paradigm of judgment of learning.In this study,Experiment 3 is to reveal the relationship between metacognition and the dynamic process of prospective memory by comparing the different effects of metacognition on prospective memory under different task difficulty conditions as well as as well as the change characteristics of spontaneous retrieval and strategic monitoring that regulate the allocation of attention resources in prospective memory processing.Applying the paradigm of value-directed remembering,in which the importance of prospective memory cues were emphasized by assigning different points to prospective memory cues,Experiment 4 attempted to explore the effect of Metacognition on prospective memory with the vary importance of cue,as well as the characteristics of dynamic process of prospective memory under the interaction between metacognition and the importance of cue.The third study examined the effects of different cue characteristics on the dynamic processing of prospective memory from the perspective of cue characteristics.In this study,Experiment 5 explored the role of generated cues in the dynamic processes of prospective memory by manipulating the sources of cues.Experiment 6 explored the effects of internal cue characteristics on prospective memory performance and its dynamic processes by manipulating the relatedness of cue and intention.Through a series of experiments,the following conclusions are drawn:(1)The results from behavior and ERPs jointly revealed that higher contextual expectation improved prospective memory performance and that increased the strategy monitoring of the cue environment of prospective memory,especially in the context related to prospective memory cue.(2)The variability of task context leads to low prospective memory performance and increased monitoring of cue environment.Datas from eye movement further showed that the spontaneous retrieval and strategic monitoring of prospective memory and the would be dynamically adjusted adaptively according to the variability contextual features.(3)Metacognition(performance prediction)promoted prospective memory performance by enhancing the strategic monitoring for strategic monitoring of the environmental characteristics of cues.(4)The internal characteristics of cues contributed to improving prospective memory performance.Higher correlation between cues and intentions enables more attention resources to be invested in monitoring for environment of prospective memory cues,whileas the benefits of the generated cues to prospective memory performance was eliminated by task difficulty.The above results indicate that the dynamic interplay between spontaneous retrieval and strategic monitoring in prospective memory is affected by context characteristics,cue features and metacognition,which supports the ternary multiple process theory.