Prospective memory in a virtual environment: Beneficial effects of cue saliency

Abstract

Prospective Memory (PM) research focuses on how the cognitive system successfully encodes and retains an intention, before retrieving it at a particular future time or in response to a particular future event. Previous work using 2D text stimuli has shown that increasing the saliency of the retrieval cue can improve performance. In this work, we investigated the effect of increased cue saliency in a more ecologically valid 3D virtual environment. The findings indicate that increased perceptual saliency of the cue does benefit PM in a dynamic and visually rich environment but that the impact of cue saliency does not interact with attentional load.

Keywords:

• Cue saliency
• Delayed intentions
• EVET
• Naturalistic task
• Prospective Memory
• Virtual environment

We are grateful to Matthew Logie for undertaking the programming to create the EVET environment. We acknowledge the Leverhulme Trust research [grant number F/00 158/W] which supported the research that we report here.

We are grateful to Matthew Logie for undertaking the programming to create the EVET environment. We acknowledge the Leverhulme Trust research [grant number F/00 158/W] which supported the research that we report here.

Notes

¹ We thank an anonymous reviewer for this point.