Benefits from prospective memory offloading depend on memory load and reminder type.

Prospective memory (PM) refers to the ability to remember to complete a task at the appropriate moment in the future. Past research has found reminders can improve PM performance in both laboratory and naturalistic settings, but few projects have examined the circumstances when and what types of reminders are most beneficial. Three experiments in the present study tested the influence of reminders in an event-based PM task under different cognitive loads. An additional study examined how effective reminders of different types were. In Experiments 1 (specific targets) and 2 (nonspecific targets), load was manipulated by having participants respond to a single (low load) or multiple (high load) targets. In Experiment 3, the association between target-action word pairs was manipulated by presenting strongly associated pairs (low load) or weakly associated pairs (high load). Experiment 4 used target-action word pairs and varied the type of reminder. Participants in the reminder conditions had target (Experiments 1 and 2), target and action (Experiment 3) or target and/or action (Experiment 4) reminders listed at the top of the screen throughout the PM task. Across the first 3 experiments, it was found that the benefit of reminders was greater under high load than low load conditions. Experiment 4 found that target-action reminders improved PM, while target-only or action-only reminders did not. Importantly, the improvements in PM from reminders occurred without cost to ongoing task performance. Together these results suggest that reminders can be beneficial for reducing PM failures, particularly under high load, without the potential downside of increased effort expenditure. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Individual differences in working memory capacity predict benefits to memory from intention offloading.

Research suggests that individuals with lower working memory have difficulty remembering to fulfil delayed intentions. The current study examined whether the ability to offload intentions onto the environment mitigated these deficits. Participants (N = 268) completed three versions of a delayed intention task with and without the use of reminders, along with three measures of working memory capacity. Results showed that individuals with higher working memory fulfilled more intentions when having to rely on their own memory, but this difference was eliminated when offloading was permitted. Individuals with lower working memory chose to offload more often, suggesting that they were less willing to engage in effortful maintenance of internal representations when given the option. Working memory was not associated with metacognitive confidence or optimal offloading choices based on point value. These findings suggest offloading may help circumvent capacity limitations associated with maintaining and remembering delayed intentions.

The influence of semantic context on false memories.

Although false memories have largely been examined with the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm, little research has focused on the semantic context in which associates are encoded. Across three experiments, we varied semantic context during a sentence-processing task with DRM associates embedded within sentences. More meaningful sentences resulted in greater memory errors (Experiment 1). Furthermore, providing contextual information to discriminate old from new items did not reduce false alarms relative to encoding words in isolation when sentences converged on the meaning of the critical lure (Experiment 2), and actually increased memory errors (Experiment 3). These results suggest that semantic context that allows for meaningful relational processing of items within-lists and that converge on the semantic meaning of the critical lure increases the likelihood that the list theme is identified, resulting in more errors at test.