The Effect Of Reminders And Importance Of PM Task On Time-based Prospective Memory

Time-based Prospective Memory is closely related with people's lives as a memory type. It refers to the individual remember to do something at some point in the future or after a specified time interval. Compared with the event-based Prospective Memory, time-based Prospective Memory needs more self-initiated and controlled attentional resources, and mainly affected by age, the character of ongoing task, task importance, time interval, and reminders et al. Test-Wait-Test-Exit Model, and Attentional-Gate Model serve as the theoretical explanations for time-based Prospective Memory. However, the theoretical explanations for tbPM were proposed on the basis of researches on tbPM in which people need to watch time continually. But in daily life, based on the different conditions, people can associated the response windows with a future context. Therefore, this research tries to study the effects of the reminders and the task importance, the allocation of attentional resources and to study the processing mechanism of tbPM when there is a context expectation by the task interference in tbPM.Following the Einstein and McDaniel (1990) paradigm, this research includes two experiments in which the ongoing task is a 2-back task and tbPM task is asking the subjects to press the A key when the experiment have processed 4 minutes. In Experiment 1, by manipulating the reminders about the time, subjects associated the response windows with a future context. In no-cue condition, subjects need to remember to press the A key when the time have passed 4 minutes while they fulfilled the 2-back task. They could watch the time at anytime when they want. In the clock condition, the tasks was the same as the no-cue condition, except that when the time had pass 3 minutes, in the middle of screen, "3 minutes" will be presented to remind the subjects time. After the experiment, task interference in four time segments and time monitoring behavior were assessed.By manipulating the reminders and the importance of tbPM, Experiment 2 intended to study the task interference in tbPM and the allocation of attentional resources. The experiment procedure was the same as the no-cue condition, except the guidance. When PM task was important, the guidance added a sentence that "whether remember to press the A key was a key focus of our investigation, please must remember this task and fulfill it" to manipulate the importance of tbPM. When PM task was unimportant, the guidance added a sentence that "whether remember to press the A key was a incidental task, not the focus of our investigation".The results indicated:(1) Reminders and the importance of tbPM can accommodate people's allocation of attentional resources. The amount of task interference in no-cue condition was significantly greater than the reminder condition, and important condition produced larger task interference than the unimportant condition.(2) The importance of tbPM changed the allocation of attention resources in no-cue condition, but not the condition when there was a reminder about time.(3) The importance of tbPM increased task processing strategy of tbPM, and increased intention completion.(4) The strategy of time monitoring which subjects tend to use is that the closer to the response windows, the more number of timely responses; and check the clock more frequently in no-cue condition than reminder condition, more frequently in important condition than unimportant condition.(5) According the different cue conditions and the importance of tbPM, participants formed different cognitive strategies. However, in any conditions, attention resources was selectively engaged in the processing mechanism of tbPM, and showed obvious stage process.