An Experiment Of Implementation Intentions Within Prospective Memory

Prospective memory that the memory of future events occurring in daily life is very common, the research about enhancing the individual's prospective memory is of practical importance. Implementation intentions are self-regulatory problems that facilitate control processing, implementation intentions are formed for the purpose of enhancing the translation of goal intentions into action. Recently, many studies show that implementation intentions can significant increases in prospective memory with implementation intentions. This paper investigated in the implementation intentions effect within prospective memory under the conditions of the perception task type, task importance and task difficulty.Implementation intentions summaries by Gollwitzer, implementation intentions are if-then plans that link situational cues with responses that are effective in attaining goals or desired outcomes ("If situation Y is encountered, then I will initiate behavior Z in order to reach goal X!"). In the prospective memory laboratory tasks, to form an implementation intention, the person relatively automatically initiate the identification of prospective memory target when he encountered prospective memory cues,and established the strong links between prospective memory cues and prospective memory tasks, it will automatically initiate the strong links between prospective memory cues and prospective memory tasks,then contributing to the implementation of prospective memory tasks.Implementation intentions are very effective strategies to improve prospective memory performance. This has been demonstrated in several studies. But so far, there are no studies that investigated in the implementation intentions effect within prospective memory under the conditions of the perception task type, task importance and task difficulty. This study fills the gap. The results show that ,changing the importance of the task, or increase the difficulty of the ongong task, will significantly affect the prospective memory task performance. So, this study that investigated in the implementation intentions effect within prospective memory by changing the on-gong task is feasible.In this study, the dual-task paradigms is applied, using E-prime program on a personal computer to present materials and records of experimental data, using the method that leave participants provide experimental materials to have them conduct imagined operation and make participants form if-then plans,it is conducted in the three experiments about implementation intentions effect within prospective memory under the conditions of the perception task type, task importance and task difficulty. Specifically, in the first experiment,it is investigated in the implementation intentions effect within prospective memory under the condition of the perception task type; in the second experiment,it is investigated in the implementation intentions effect within prospective memory under the condition of the task importance; in the third experiment,it is investigated in the implementation intentions effect within prospective memory under the condition of the task difficulty. The there experiments investigated in the implementation intentions effect within prospective memory by ongong task affecting prospective memory, the experimental results analyzed the achievements of ongong task and prospective memory. Because of the dual-task paradigms, prospective memory task and ongong task meanwhile occupied cognitive resources of the individual participant, two kinds of tasks compete for limited resources, two kinds of tasks is bound to interact. So, under the condition of the implementation intentions, prospective memory performance have been improved, but the performance of ongong task have not been damaged, then it can be infered that implementation intentions strategies are effective.Based on the above three experiments, the major findings are as follows:(1) In prospective memory task, under the three conditions of the perception task type,task importance and task difficulty, to form an implementation intention significantly all increased prospective memory performance; (2) In ongong task, under the three conditions of the perception task type, task importance and task difficulty, to form an implementation intention did not reduce the performance of ongong task;(3) In the there experiments, under the three conditions of the perception task type, task importance and task difficulty, to form an implementation intention for improving prospective memory performance is not based on the cost of reducing the performance of ongong task;(4) The performance of ongong task under the conditions of the implementation intentions, slightly better than that under the standard conditions. This shows that, to form an implementation intention, not only increased prospective memory perfor- mance,but also save the cognitive resources for processing prospective memory task, then there is more cognitive resources for processing ongong task, so the performance of ongong task slightly increased;(5) Participants were required prospective memory task after finishing the experiment, the recall rates under the conditions of implementation intentions are significantly higher than the results under the standard conditions;(6) Results of this study support the previous experimental results,and show that implementation intentions are an effective strategy for improving prospective memory performance.