A Study On The Impact Of Interrupt Delay Interval On Event-based Prospective Memory

Prospective Memory is a new research area on memory which appeared in 1990s,in contrast to retrospective memory, remembering to carry out an or several intended actions at some designated point in the future.This study reviewed it from the definition,characteristics, research methods, processing mechanisms, factors and other aspects.Delay is an important feature of prospective memory. To deeply understand the nature of prospective memory ,we should know what is the the mechanism of delay on it firstly. Many researchers have used the Delaying implementation paradigm(Einstein and McDaniel,2003) and the Classic Experimental paradigm (Einstein and McDaniel,1990) to explore the effects of delay on prospective memory,and they have achieved a great deal of success, but owing to the difference in experimental material, tasks, they also have got many different results. So far, many research findings have shown that the processing of Prospective memory in first few minutes is a very complex coding and stored procedure. Therefore, further studies about this variable are necessary.Up to now, most studies about prospective memory use the Delaying implementation paradigm and the Classic paradigm, and these experimental results are different in reality, even though they does not meet the essential purpose of prospective memory. In real life, most of individuals, failure of prospective memory is due to the sudden interruption, so we think that the interruption is bound to generate a prospective memory task - restore the interrupted task. Till now, research about the effects of interruption on prospective memory in China is few, and foreign study about this is still in its infancy too.Considering the above two aspects, we designed two different experiments in which we selected undergraduate students of HeNan University as subjects, used restoring the interrupted task as a prospective memory task, and used the number of times that restore the interrupted task correctly as prospective memory task performance to study the performance prospective memory under different interrupt delay conditions.Experiment 1 we used the single factor completely randomized design, set four different experimental conditions at the beginning and the end of the interrupt task: the baseline condition: no delay and no tip;the coding tip condition: tip during delayed interval; the encoding delay condition: a delay and no tip; search delay condition :delay after finishing interrupt task. Experiment 2 used the same design, and set up two different experimental conditions: baseline condition same as Experiment 1 and retrieval tips (tips with a delayed interval) condition . Results of this study showed that performance of prospective memory impacted by different interrupt delay were remarkable different, the main conclusions were drawn :(The study reached the followingconclusions:)1. under the condition of the interrupt suddenly appeared or no help, even if the delay time is very short (less than 3 minutes), individual is also very easy to forget to resume the interrupted task.2. the condition of after an interrupt occurs and before the start of the interrupt task or explicitly suggest showed that a short delay is conducive to the recovery of the interrupted task, but it alone can not improve the individual's prospective memory performance.3. increasing delay time betwteen the end of old interrupt tasks and beginning of new tasks and let the different tasks immune to the competition is more conducive to individual resume the interrupted task.4. accurate description of the target cues under the condition of after the end of interrupt the task and before the start of a new task can greatly improve the accurate description of the interrupted task of restoration of individual results.5. to provide effective retrieval operation is more conducive than to provide efficient coding cues to resume the interrupted task.