The Effect Of Task Difficulty And Task Importance On Task Interference Effect Of Prospective Memory

Research history of memory date back 100 years ago and make great progress till the end of 20 century. However, academics criticized it’s focus outside daily life. In responding this circumstance prospective memory then receive much attention in this field, which include two categories, event-based prospective memory and time-based prospective memory. Fifty to seventy memory failure in daily life are prospective memory, as a result it is very important to investigate the mechanism of prospective memory. These days the task interference effect of prospective memory become the hot topic in this field, which refer to the phenomenon that executive prospective memory task reduce the performance of on-going task, especially the time latency of the on-going task. Multiprocessing review, PAM and attention resource deploy proposal are three theories trying to explain the aforementioned phenomenon. The current research include two experiments. In experiment 1, we vary the task demanding through the difficult degree of the task, and the result indicate that the task demanding affect the interference of prospective memory. In experiment2, task demanding and task importance both are controlled, the result of which suggest that they both contribute the interference. The conclusion from current experiment support the attention resource deploy proposal, but contradict with the other two theories. Limitations and implication of current research then discussed.