A Study About The Attentional Resources Of Prospective Memory

Prospective memory refers to remembering to carry out an intended action at the appropriate time in the future. It is worth more and more attention because it is so common in our daily life. Many psychologists believe it is a band-new type of remembering which is different from retrospective remembering. But some famous psychologists have opposite opinion that prospective memory does not exist independently, it is just a special kind of retrospective memory. When taking a glance at the past literature concerning the differences between retrospective and prospective remembering, mostly there are descriptive comments rather than experimental research. This research adopts the classic paradigm of prospective remembering to carry out direct experimental research about the differences between prospective and retrospective remembering. At last, some conclusions have been drawn:1. Under the same conditions,when subjects form prospective intentions and retrospective intentions respectively, they will adopt different strategies to allot their attention resources. Specifically, in prospective remembering, they assign some attention to prospective remembering to monitor whether the prospective cues emerge or not. On the other side, in retrospective remembering, it is due to the extraneous information which can remind subjects of making response at the correct time, subjects need not assign extra attention resources to monitor if the target cues appear or not. As a result ,the outcome of these experiments support this idea that prospective remembering is different from retrospective remembering concerning the need for attention resources, that is , the successful execution of prospective remembering do need attention resources.2. Experiment one has proved that successful prospective remembering do need attention resources. So are these attention resources specific ones or general? Priorresearch support that the attention resources functions a lot in prospective remembering is specific one, that is, monitoring attention rather than phonological loop attention plays a important role in successful prospective remembering. In experiment two and three, we go deep into these issues.the results do not the preceding ideas, in our experiments, both phonological loop attention and monitoring attention play important role in successful prospective remembering. If the ongoing task employs phonological attention resources, the prospective remerbering will suffer a lot in this condition.