The Research On The Effect Of Interruption And Different Reminder On Prospective Memory

Prospective memory is the memory of the designed events and activities to be executed in the future. Prospective memory plays a very important role in our life, it is relevant to people's plan and future directional behaviors. In every day life, when people plan to execute some activities, they usually forget what to do because of the incident events. It brings a lot of inconveniences. If we can forecast the incident events influences on the activities to be executed in the future effectively, and we are supplied with reminders after interruptions, it will avoids the harmful influences by the interruptions. So the research on the effect of interruptions and reminders on prospective memory is meaningful in theory aspect or practice aspect.By review the documentary papers, we know that there are only a few researches on interruptions and reminders, but there are very different results among them. The paper presumes that interruptions can influent the prospective memory, and it will reduce the scores of prospective memory task. And, after the ongoing task is interrupted, people are supplied with reminders by some means, it may promote people to pick up the information on the designed events, it means, people will recall what to do. It avoids the harmful influences from interruptions to some degree. The paper stands in experimental perspective, it tests whether interruptions have a harmful effect for prospective memory by Experiment One. There results show: the interruptions on ongoing tasks can reduce the scores of prospective memory task. Whether the reminders after interruptions can help participants to recall the prospective memory task, and whether the different reminders have different functions on participants'prospective memory recover. For above questions, the research designs Experiment Two, it explores different reminders'effect on prospective memory's recover. There results show: the reminders interruptions can increase participants'scores of prospective memory task, especially, the semantic reminder has a very notable effect.As for the results of experiment, the paper analyzes and discusses them by the perspective of attention resources and the binds between target events and responses. Interruption task is different from ongoing task in quality, when interruption task appeared, for accomplishing the task, the attention resources will be occupied, but the attention resources are limited, the binds between target events and responses will be ignored and forgot in some degree. The reminders after interruption task will help participants to remind the binds between target events and responses quickly. When participants see the target stimulations, they will pick up the binds quickly, and respond quickly. Without reminders, participants have to recall the information on prospective memory task spontaneously when their attention resources are not be occupied completely. Compared with reminders of explicit outside clue, ego awakening need more attention resources, it is more difficulty to recall the binds between target events and responses, and it needs more time, it is unhelpful to accomplish the task for the participants. So, compared with the controlled group without any reminders, the participants have better scores in the experimental group with reminders.Reminders are helpful for the participants recalling the information on prospective memory task, and different reminders have different effect. Explicit semantic reminder suggests the end of interruption task. On the one hand, the semantic reminder warns the participants to take back the attention from interruption task, and gets ready for the next task. On the other hand, the semantic reminder contains the information on prospective memory task, it will help participants to pick up the binds between target events and responses. It will also help participants to distinguish the target stimulations and make relevant responses.When blank screen reminder appeared, participants are given a span of time, during it, participants pick back attentions initiatively from the interruption task and recall the ongoing task and prospective memory task automatically. The ego awakening depends on participants'initiative thinking, and activates the indictor level of the built binds, it will impel to accomplish prospective memory task. The result of blank screen reminder is better than the result without any reminders, but it is not notable. The new idea of paper lies in testing and verifying the experience of life by means of experiment, the paper explores the reminder and different reminders effect on the base of interruption research, and it supplies with data accumulation and foundation for exploring the effective solution ways, and it also explores the possible mechanism.There are many defects in the paper. To begin with, the interruption task is different from the ongoing task. It will arouse participants'attentions, but the listening materials are taken on in English, they are more difficulty than ongoing task. It will exaggerate the influences of the interruption task to some degree. Furthermore, the kinds of reminders in Experiment Two are too limited, they can not contain all the possibility in our life, the pronunciation reminder, drawing reminder and so on, can be added into the experiment. The paper waits on deepening in many aspects.