| Prospective memory (ProM) is different from retrospective memory(RetM). RetM concerns the memory which took place in the past time, while ProM is a type of memory in which an individual must remember to perform an intended activity at given time in the future.Before 1970, most researches about memory were concerned with RetM, there were few studies on ProM. Until 1971, Loftus began to study ProM in cognitive psychology, and the name of prospective memory appeared in 1975. During 1970s and 1980s, researchers had done some studies and gotten some descriptive data about ProM through field investigation method, because some unrelated variables could not be completely controlled, some results were not consistent. In 1990, Einstein and McDaniel developed the experimental paradigm to study ProM. It adopts two tasks in order to simulate the real-world ProM tasks, one is the ProM task, and the other is an ongoing task, and the ProM task is embedded in the ongoing task. Typical experimental paradigm involves asking participants to press a special key on the keyboard when they encounter a particular target word in the course of performing the ongoing activity, then record the ProM performance according to the times of their remembering to press the key properly. The experimental paradigm is a progressive method because it can control the unrelated variables more completely . From then on, the paradigm has been generally used in the study of ProM, which promotes the research on ProM largely.In recent years, ProM has generally become the hot spot in psychology, researchers have done a series of studies about ProM, such as the effect factors, the neurophysiological basis and the cognitive processing mechanism, etc.Dobbs regards that ProM is more than memory, it involves a variety of qualitatively different components, such as planning, monitoring, compliance and so on. Consequently, some researches indicated that the personality variables can affect the performance of ProM, such as behavior mode, anxiety, verbal ability et al. Butthere are many fields needed to be studied. For example, there has not been any study on the correlation between cognitive style and ProM.The field dependence-independence (FDI) is an important cognitive style, it reflects the individual difference in terms of the autonomy of external or internal referent. It is hypothesized that field-dependence(FD) individuals rely more on external frames of reference, while field-independence(FI) individuals rely more on internal frames of reference. From the recent studies concerned with FDI, researchers argue that FI individuals develop the meta-cognitive skills more early and more efficiently than FD individuals, especially the attention monitor, cognitive restructure, etc. At the same time, the executive attentional system or supervisory attention system (SAS) continuously commits to monitoring the environment for cues or markers associated with the intended action, and interrupt the ongoing task in order to execute the intended activity at an appropriate time. So the FDI might affect the performance of ProM.In addition, the cue characters affect the performance of ProM since they affect the monitor of the cue. Foreign researchers have found that unfamiliar and distinctive cue facilitate the performance of ProM. But there has not been any study concerned the question in China until today.The present research studied the effect of FDI, type of task, and cue characters on ProM. Following the experimental paradigm and employing Chinese words, the research includes three experiments in which the ongoing task is a short-time memory test and the ProM task is asking the subjects to press the space bar on the keyboard. Experiment 1 focused on the effect of FDI on event-based ProM, which adopted independent groups design including FD and FI group; Experiment 2 focused on the effect of FDI and type of ProM on ProM, the design of the experiment was a 2(cognitive style: FD; FI)x2(type of ProM: event-based; time-based) mixed factorial that included the between...
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