The Influence Of Divided Attention And Cue Distinctiveness On Transfer-Appropriate Processing Effect In Prospective Memory

Prospective memory refers to remembering to carry outan intended action at the appropriate time in the future. Theperformance of prospective memory is influenced by therelationship between the processing types of ongoing task andprospective memory task. The performance is better when theprocessing types of ongoing task are consistent than that whenthey are not. This phenomenon is called the transferappropriate process effect (TAP effect for short) inprospective memory.There were conflicting results among past research ontransfer-appropriate processing effect in prospective memory.Although no specific finding has indicated that certainfactors influenced the TAP effect, other studies found thatdivided attention and cue distinctiveness may have distincteffect on the performance of prospective memory in differentexperimental conditions.Using the dual-task experimental pattern, this researchexplored the TAP effect in prospective memory, and analyzedthe influence of divided attention and cue distinctiveness onthe TAP effect in prospective memory.The results show that:(1) Matched target-ongoing task conditions were less influenced by divided attention and cue-distinctiveness thanmismatched target-ongoing task conditions. The reasonprobably lied in that prospective memory would need to dependheavily on strategic processes and attention resource, whereasin the matched conditions more automatic processes wouldcontribute as well as strategic processes to prospectivememory. The match of the ongoing task and the nature of theintention resulted in better prospective memory performancethan a mismatch between them. There was a clear TAP effect inthe prospective memory performance.(2) Divided attention demanded more attention resourceand the resource used for prospective memory was decrease,so that prospective memory performance under mismatchedtarget-ongoing task condition was decrease more seriously thanunder matched target-ongoing task condition. Dividedattention influenced the TAP effect in prospective memoryperformance. The difference of TAP effect between thenon-divided attention, slightly divided attention andseriously divided attention condition was significant underthe non-distinctive-cue condition, whereas not under thedistinctive-cue condition.(3) When the cue was distinctive, less attentionresource demanded to find cues, so that the difference ofprospective memory performance was decreased between undermismatched target-ongoing task condition and under matchedtarget-ongoing task condition. The difference of TAP effectbetween the distinctive-cue and non-distinctive-cue conditionwas not significant under the non-divided attention condition, whereas significant under the slightly divided attentioncondition and seriously divided attention condition.(4) The interaction between divided attention andcue-distinctiveness on TAP effect to some degree counteractedthe influence of them on TAP effect respectively.