The Effect Of Task Importance On Event-Based Prospective Memory

Prospective memory refers to the memory of an activity or event to be completed in the future.Prospective memory performance can be improved by increasing the importance of the prospective memory task,but the improvement in prospective memory performance is usually at the expense of the ongoing task.To manipulate the task importance of prospective memory in different ways,for example,by offering rewards,providing social motivation,and emphasizing the absolute or relative importance of the prospective task.Previous studies have found that providing significant social motivation can improve prospective memory performance without affecting the completion of ongoing tasks.While providing external rewards can improve the performance of prospective memory tasks,it can affect the performance of ongoing tasks.In this study,we hypothesized that task importance would affect the performance of prospective memory tasks without requiring additional attentional monitoring resources.In experiment 1 comparative social importance,promises rewards,social significance and promised reward,standard prospective memory instructions(control condition),the condition of five kinds of prospective memory task,the results show that compared with the baseline conditions no prospective memory task,have ongoing task of prospective memory tasks reaction time is slower,only social importance and awards presented at the same time,There is a significant difference between the ongoing task and other conditions,indicating that under this condition,additional attention monitoring costs are generated.Compared with the standard condition,the social importance and the commitment reward condition did not significantly slow down the response time of the ongoing task.Thus,in the instructions presented alone reward or social importance operation task significance can do not take up the extra attention to monitoring resources,raising the grade of the prospective memory,and in the instructions present task significance superposition,take up the extra attention to monitoring resources,impact on task performance.Experiment 2 importance task specific to reward conditions,the importance of research task presentation influence on prospective memory performance,using rewards(rewards,no reward)x task significance(relative important tasks,task is absolutely important),two factors between subjects design to discuss the reward task significance under the condition of different presentation will influence events prospective memory performance,The results showed that the presentation of significance did not affect the performance of prospective memory tasks.