The Study Of Targets’ Salience And Interval Effect On Aftereffects Of Prospective Memory

Prospective memory has been one of the most important research problems in memory, even in psychological field, and had a long history. Since Einstein and McDaniel (1990) put forward a classic dual-task paradigm, prospective memory research has gone through rapid development. Prospective memory studies focused on its cognitive mechanisms, but recently neuroscience has attracted more attention. The main goal of previous prospective memory studies involved three parts:intention formation、 intention retention and intention execution. And researchers have made outstanding achievements in the fields of uncompleted intentions. There are rare researchers who have investigated completed prospective intentions (Aftereffects of competed intentions). Whether intention will be immediately pass off or remain a certain level of activation after intention has been successfully executed? What factors can lead to this phenomenon? And what is the mechanism underlying the aftereffects of competed intentions?Therefore, on the basis of previous research, in this study we first focus on studying the process of intention which has been finished, also named Aftereffects of competed intentions. In this research, there are three studies:Study One investigate whether different intervals have significant effects on aftereffects of completed intentions; By changing salience of targets, and adding new prospective memory at Finish-PM block, Study Two investigated whether targets’ salient or not can change result; In Study Three by changing new prospective memory task, we investigated cognitive mechanism about aftereffects of completed intentions; At the same time, we test the theory of cognitive mechanisms of prospective memory.By three experiments, We can draw the following conclusions:(1) different from the view of intention superiority effect, prospective intentions remain at a certain level of activation after having been completed; (3) Different intervals have no significant effects on aftereffects of completed intentions, when the target is salient; (4) Targets’salience and new prospective memory task generate interaction, they have a significant effect on aftereffects of completed intentions; (5) In this study, the results supported the Spontaneous Activation Theory, aftereffects of completed intentions can be spontaneous retrieval; (1) Successful completion of the prospective memory task requires using different cognitive processes depend on different conditions.