Prospective memory: The relative effects of encoding, retrieval, and the match between encoding and retrieval

Abstract

Previous prospective memory studies have revealed some important features of encoding, retrieval, and the match between the encoding and the retrieval that contribute to prospective memory performance. However, these studies have not provided evidence concerning the relative importance of these three factors because no study has investigated all three in a single design. We developed a laboratory-based paradigm that allowed us to manipulate different characteristics of encoding, retrieval, and the match between encoding and retrieval simultaneously in a single experiment. The results of eight experiments showed that all three factors have an influence on prospective memory performance, but that the match between encoding and retrieval has a significantly larger influence than either encoding or retrieval factors.

Acknowledgements

This research was supported in part by a grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. We would also like to thank Angela Kingston, Erin Sneek, and Natasha Thoren for their help with writing the sentence stimuli and collecting data. We thank Rebekah E. Smith for helpful comments.

Notes

¹See Sternberg (1977, 1996), who used a similar approach to identify the components most important for completing analogical reasoning tasks. See also Hannon and Daneman (2001) who used a componential approach to investigate individual differences in reading comprehension ability.

²We were unable to do this kind of cost analysis on reaction times to the ongoing sentence verification tasks in Experiments 1–4B because sentence difficulty and sentence length were not controlled across the different prospective memory conditions.

³Of course, too much specificity about the retrieval cue at the time of encoding could be detrimental to retrieval when the retrieval cues have changed in a way that was not anticipated at encoding (see Cook, Marsh, & Hicks, 2005).