The Event-based Prospective Memory In Patients With Traumatic Brain Injury

Prospective memory is defined as remembering to carry out an intended actions atan appropriate time in the future. The research of prospective memory has for decades.In1990， Einstein and McDaniel proposed the Dual-task Paradigm to investigate theprospective memory， which has a far-reaching effect in this area. In the initial stage，the study of prospective memory was focus on the influencing factors of it. In recentyears，with the rise of cognitive neuroscience，the research focuses has turned to theexploration of the brain mechanisms.The researcher used Dual-task Paradigm to investigate the event-based prospectivememory in patients with traumatic brain injury in this study， who designed twoexperiments to discuss the difference decline between prospective and retrospectivememory and the influence of cognitive resources available and ongoing task encodingtype.Experiment1is2×2within-subjects design. In this part， the participantsevaluate their prospective and retrospective memory with PRMQ questionnaire andthen use the Dual-task Paradigm to test it. In the result， the researcher discusses thedecline of the two kinds of memory.Experiment2used2×2×2to study the influence of cognitive resourcesavailable and ongoing task encoding type， trying to find the condition in which thepatients with traumatic brain injury prone to memory failure.The researcher gets the following Conclusion from the two experiments.(1) Patients with traumatic brain injury have no obvious decline in retrospectivememory but in prospective memory compare to control group.(2)The reaction time in this study indicate that the cognitive processing time issimilar in two types of memory in the patients with traumatic brain injury， which isslower than the control group. Correspondingly，the cognitive processing time ofprospective memory is faster than retrospective memory in control group.(3)In the four experimental conditions， the prospective memory of the patientswith traumatic brain injury decline only in the condition of low cognitive resourcesavailable and semantic encoding.the reaction times of ongoing task and prospectivememory task in experimental group are slower than control group. In other words，the efficiency of Cognitive processing of the patients with traumatic brain injury is impaired obviously.