The Impact Of Task Load And Execution Intention On Prospective Memory

Prospective memory are closely related to people's daily lives, work and study. It is defined as remembering to carry out an or several intended actions at some designated point in the future. Prospective memory depending on the start clues can be divided three types:event-based prospective memory, time-based prospective memory and activity-based prospective memory. But today's studies are mostly based om event and om time of prospective memory, hardly any about the activity-based prospective memory.Implementation intentions is thought to be a very effective self-regulation strategy. It can increase the significance of the target cues and strengthen the association of target cues and intended actions, thereby increase possibilities of performing the intended actions. As a powerful self-regulatory strategy, the effectiveness of implementation intention has confirmed in many realms, but whether it can facilitate the performance of prospective memory, as well as on what conditions it can facilitate the performance of prospective memory, still has inconsistent conclusions.In the way of experimental research in the lab, the thesis selects undergraduates and postgraduates as the subjects and chooses the words in different semantic categories as the experimental materials, to study the prospective memory of individuals. The thesis includes three parts, respectively discussing the influences of task load and execution intention on the prospective memory under different prospective memory types.Through the analysis of research results, the following conclusions are obtained:(1) In the prospective memory tasks based on event and time, the accuracy of prospective memory tasks in the task condition of low load is obviously higher than that in the task condition of high load, while the load during tasks has no significant influence on the accuracy of prospective memory tasks based on activity;(2) Under the three prospective memory task types, the accuracy of prospective memory tasks under low load is obviously higher than that under high load;(3) Under the three prospective memory task types, the accuracy of prospective memory formed with execution intention is obviously higher than that formed without execution intention;(4) There are obvious differences in the accuracies of prospective memory tasks in the three types of prospective memory:the accuracy of activity-based prospective memory task is the highest, followed by that of the time-based prospective memory task and the event-based one.On the basis of the above results, the thesis makes further research on the allocation of cognitive resources of prospective memory under different task load conditions and discusses the distribution rules of individual cognitive resources in different task loads and prospective memory task loads. Also, the role of execution intention on the prospective memory tasks is explored.