The influence of partial-match cues on event-based prospective memory.

In event-based prospective memory tasks people form an intention to respond when an environmental cue signals that conditions are appropriate to fulfil an intended activity. In the ongoing activity the authors embedded partial-match cues that only partially, but not completely, satisfied the conditions required to make a prospective response. The consequence of encountering these partial-match cues was to increase responses to appropriate prospective memory cues encountered later. This outcome occurred both with semantic and orthographic cues, but only the former led to longer processing latencies of the partial-match cues. This asymmetry suggests that partial-match cues may not need to be processed consciously in order to benefit event-based prospective memory. A parametric manipulation of the number of partial-match cues resulted in numerically but not statistically better prospective memory. Consequently, partial-match cues may function as overt reminders of the intention to respond or they may serve to engage participants in self-initiated remindings of the intention.

Measuring the activation level of critical lures in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm.

In four experiments, the activation level in memory of critical lures was assessed after encoding Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) lists. The results demonstrated that studying longer, 14-item lists resulted in superadditive priming of the lures because they were more available in memory than truly studied items. Studying shorter DRM lists resulted in activation levels of the lures that was similar to studied items. Collectively, the results suggest that a first stage in creating false memories with the DRM paradigm is making the critical lures highly available in memory during list encoding. Moreover, the results suggest that false memories are likely to have occurred at the time a list is studied by a mechanism such as an implicit associative response, but a monitoring phase at retrieval is acknowledged that could be used to avoid them. Other theoretical accounts are also considered.

The demands of an ongoing activity influence the success of event-based prospective memory.

Four experiments were conducted to evaluate whether event-based prospective memory would be sensitive to the concurrent demands of the ongoing activity in which intention-related cues were embedded. In Experiments 1 and 2, random alternation between two judgments in the ongoing task reduced prospective memory as compared with having a single task throughout. In Experiment 3, participants' making two binary judgments on every trial resulted in worse prospective memory than did their making single four-alternative judgments. In Experiment 4, participants' making two related judgments resulted in better prospective memory than did their making two unrelated judgments. The results are consistent in spirit with a production rule account of the processing resources that are available when intention-related cues are encountered. Therefore, event-based prospective memory can inversely covary with the cognitive demands of the ongoing activity.

Investigating the output monitoring component of event-based prospective memory performance.

The goal of this study was to augment the standard event-based prospective memory paradigm with an output monitoring component. That component involves memory for past actions and, in the context of prospective memory, is largely responsible for repetition and omission errors. The modified paradigm also provides an index of what people believe to be true concerning their past prospective memory performance. More elaborate prospective responses decreased forgetting that an intention had been fulfilled, whereas contextual change increased forgetting. In Experiments 1-3, people often reported that they had fulfilled an intention on a previous occasion when they actually had not, but distinctive responses reduced that error in Experiment 4. Therefore, people's beliefs about their past performance can influence the incidence of repetition and omission errors in event-based prospective memory tasks.

Backward associative strength determines source attributions given to false memories.

Source attributions for falsely remembered material were investigated in two experiments. A male and a female speaker each presented either an entire word list or half of the items from each of multiple Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) lists commonly used in this paradigm. In the latter condition the tendency of each list half to activate a nonpresented, critical list theme item was manipulated. All of the list halves differed in backward associative strength (BAS), and each was presented by one or the other of the two speakers. In these correlated conditions, when critical items were falsely recognized (Experiments 1 and 2) or recalled (Experiment 2), source attributions were more frequently made to the speaker of the list items with the higher average BAS. This source attribution effect appears to result from the binding of list item source characteristics to activated critical items during encoding, as opposed to being the result of a biased retrieval process. The results are interpreted as consistent with an activation/monitoring account of false memory in the DRM paradigm.