The Influence Of Emotional Characteristics Of Target And Context On The Aftereffects Of Prospective Memory

Prospective memory(PM)refers to the ability to remember to execute a delayed intention in the appropriate context.Everyday examples of prospective memory tasks are remembering to buy bread on the way home,to take medication every evening at the same time,and to join a meeting at a specific time.More and more researchers begin to focus on the aftereffects of prospective memory.It is defined as the phenomenon that an individual repeatedly performed an already completed prospective memory intention,or the completed intention has an influence on the performance of the ongoing task.Researchers usually use the repeated prospective memory cue paradigm to investigate the aftereffects of prospective memory.It contains two phases: active-PM phase and finished-PM phase.In the active-PM phase,participants are instructed to make a response whenever they encounter a target cue,which occurs very infrequently during an ongoing task.Following an active-PM phase,participants engaged in a finished-PM phase.Importantly,prior to the finished-PM phase,the participants had been instructed that the PM task was finished and that they would no longer need to press the designated key in response to target cues.The target cues continued to be presented during the finished-PM phase,and commission errors were observed.The aftereffects of prospective memory have some negative effects on daily life,such as an individual accidentally taking an important medication twice.Research on the relationship between emotion and cognition has always been a hotspot in the area of cognitive psychology.Lots of studies have been focused on the relationship between emotion and prospective memory,but few studies have explored the relationship between emotion and the aftereffects of prospective memory.Will the target valence and arousal affect the aftereffects of prospective memory? Does the context valence also affect the aftereffects of prospective memory?Therefore,experiment 1 preliminarily explored the effect of target valence on the aftereffects of prospective memory.On the basis of experiment 1,experiment 2manipulated the target valence and arousal to distinguish the effect of target valence and arousal on the aftereffects of prospective memory.Considering the prospective memorytarget might be affected by the stimulus valence,experiment 3 further explored the effect of target valence,arousal and context valence on the aftereffects of prospective memory based on the experiment 1 and 2.Through three experiments,this following conclusions were obtained:(1)The positive prospective memory target,negative prospective memory target and high arousal prospective memory target would expand the aftereffects of prospective memory;(2)The prospective memory target and context from the same valence would produce greater aftereffects of prospective memory;(3)Context valence would moderate the effect of arousal on the aftereffects of prospective memory in different target valences;(4)The cognitive mechanism for the emotion on the aftereffects of prospective memory was in line with controlled processing.