An Experimental Research On The Special Processing Of Prospective Memory

Prospective memory is one of the Life Memories, which is often used in people's everyday life. As a new research orientation extracted from daily lives, it rised in 90s last century, which is the result of people's dissatisfaction with memory research not going into real life and not guiding people's lives. From the perspective of cognitive processing, the present research on prospective memory is mainly on memory withdrawal; on the contrary, the research on the information coding mechanism is relatively short. As a Lab Research based on the premise of scientific, presiseness and reliability of this research, from the angle of cognitive information coding, the possible modes of two cognitive processing styles of semantics and image are explored, at stage of memory coding of prospective memory. And the focus of this research is to prove the existence of Special Processing Mechanism, which is confirmed by the result of this research. Simultaneously, the functions of these two cognitive processing styles of semantics and image are roughly paralleled.In this research, the two research methods of Experimental Dissociation Paradigm and the Dual Task Paradigm of prospective memory laboratory research are tentatively combined, which could lead to more precise research and more persuasive explaination for the special coding of prospective memory research. In this research design, the extra variables like the"hot"TAP Effect and Attention Resource that could influence the result of the special coding are efficiently and strictly controlled. Some strength nesses of former experiments are employed, when the experiment materials are selected. Hundreds of pictures are used as the Image Processing materials. Two types of masking tasks, semantics-semantics and image-image, are selected to avoid the TAP Effect; on the other hand, the researcher places more emphasis on the irregularity of these picture materials, and strictly controls the attention resource bottom-up allocation of the masking task, which could ensure the effective usage of the attention resources when the prospective memory experiment tasks are being conducted, avoid the low validity by distraction of the subjects. As a result, the precisness of experiment result could be ensured. At the same time, the researcher firstly employs the SEM to inspect the latent relation between semantic processing and image processing, which supportively confirmed the hypothesis of this research.213 volunteers, 85 males and 128 females whose naked or corrected eye-sights are all above the level of 1.0, and not having had been subjects in similar experiments, from Jilin University are selected as subjects in this experimental research. The result shows that without prospective memory task, there is not significant difference between the percentages of subjects'correct answers in the match experiment of word-picture (t=1.434, p>.05) and the reaction of the subjects to the words and pictures are on the same base line; in the prospective memory experiment, there is no interactive effect between the masking tasks and prospective memory tasks (F₁(1,212)=2.070, p>.05; F₂(1,4)=.210, p>.05). The main effect of masking tasks is not significant (F₁(1,212)=1.190,p>.05; F₂(1,4)=.966 P>.05). Only the main effect of prospective memory tasks is significant(F₁(1,212)=5.162*, p<.05; F₂(1,4)=8.606*, p<.05), which means there is significant difference between semantic Proces- sing and image processing. The dissociation phenomenon appears which means there is existence of the Special Processing at the stage of information coding confirmed by the result of this experiment. The subjects'performance of semantics processing is much better than thatof image processing in following investigation(t₍₂₁₂₎=2.358*, p<.05), the cause of this result will be explored and analyzed in the future study. Besides, there is no significant difference concerning gender(semantics processing, t₍₂₁₁₎=.058, p>.05; image processing, t₍₂₁₁₎=.249, p>.05), which means this result is in accord with the results of former researches.