The Experimental Research On Prospective Memory Task Importance Effects In Children

Prospective memory(Pm) involves remembering to carry out anor some intended activities in the future. It is a phenomenon ofmemory in which people often experience in the real world andmost failures about memory are relative to prospective memory.Maybe it is the important reason that prospective memory becomeone of the hot topics in the memory theory research.The research on prospective memory development in childrenis surprisingly small and still in embryonic stage, mostly inadult especially in older people. This paper employed theEinstein and McDaniel'(1990) paradigm and explored thedifferent prospective memory task importance effect. We alsoprobe how the attraction of on-going task affect the importantprospective memory task performance.The experiment research found that importance instructionsmay improve prospective memory task performance in children. TheResults indicated as follows:(1) There was an importance effect on prospective memoryperformance in children, the same as in adult. Theimportance instructions may improve prospective memoryperformance.(2) There was a significant difference in importanceeffects on prospective memory task type in children, andevent-based prospective memory task performance was better than time-based prospective memory task.(3) The age factor didn't influence the prospective memorytask importance effect.(4) The attraction on-going task had a marginal effect onprospective memory task importance effect.