Wait a second: Brief delays in responding reduce focality effects in event-based prospective memory

Abstract

Remembering to perform deferred actions when an event is encountered in the future is referred to as event-based prospective memory (PM). We examined whether the failure of individuals to allocate sufficient attentional resources to nonfocal PM tasks can be linked to the response demands inherent in PM paradigms that require the PM task to race for response selection with the speeded ongoing task. In three experiments, participants performed a lexical decision task while being required to make a separate PM response to a specific word (focal), an exemplar of a category (nonfocal), or a syllable (nonfocal). We manipulated the earliest time participants could make task responses by presenting a tone at varying onsets (0–1,600 ms) following stimulus presentation. Improvements in focal PM and nonfocal PM were observed at response delays as brief as 200 ms and 400 ms, respectively. Nonfocal PM accuracy was comparable to focal PM accuracy at delays of 600 ms and 1,600 ms for categorical targets and syllable targets, respectively. Delaying task responses freed the resource-demanding processing operations used on the ongoing task for use on the nonfocal PM task, increasing the probability that the nonfocal PM features of ongoing task stimuli were adequately assessed prior to the ongoing task response.

Keywords:

• Prospective memory
• Ongoing task costs
• Target focality
• Response delay

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by Discovery Grant DP0986942 from the Australian Research Council awarded to Loft and Remington and by Discovery Grant DP0666772 awarded to Remington. We thank Sarah-Jane Stratton, Luke Strickland, Louise Delane, and Karli Riseborough for assistance in collecting and analysing the data.