Research On Influencing Factors Of Prospective Memory

Prospective memory has been a newly research field in recent ten years. Relative to retrospective memory, prospective memory is memory about future events or behaviors. This paper first reviewed the relationship between prospective memory and retrospective memory, the characteristic, the categories and research methods, as well as the present studies of prospective memory. Then the influence of cue character, divided attention and delay on prospective memory was studied by two experiments.Experiment 1 tested the effects of categories of cues, divided attention and delay on prospective memory. The results showed that there was no significant difference of correct percentage on prospective memory in tasks of both semantic kind and perceptual kind, but subject's reacting speed of the former was faster than that of the latter, divided attention had extremely significant difference on both semantics and perceptions, delay had no influence on the performance of the prospective memory.Experiment 2 studied the influence of categories of cues, the typical cues, divided attention and delay on prospective memory with changed and controlled divided attention tasks. The results showed that the reaction time of semantic task was shorter than of perceptual task, while there is no accuracy difference between them, typical cues has significant influence on prospective memory, delay did not take effect on accuracy, but the reacting speed of 1min delay is much faster than the one of 5min delay.Based on the combination of experiment 1 and 2, conclusions were drawn: different kind of cues affect very little on the accuracy of prospective, but reaction time of semantic task is shorter than that of perceptual task, divided attention has clear negative influence on prospective memory, while the typical cues apparently improve prospective memory, delay shows no influence on prospective memory within 5min. At the same time, the results on the one hand, supported the multiprocess framework by McDaniel and Einstein (2000), which argues that the cognitive processes are relevant to being both automatic and strategic, on the other hand, were in favor of conclusions that dynamic characteristics of cognitive components may emerge in the processes of the prospective memory, and that the cognitive resources are automatic regulated and allocated in terms of the nature of tasks.Finally, the insufficiency of this paper and the future trends of prospective memory were discussed.