On the automatic nature of the task-appropriate processing effect in event-based prospective memory

Abstract

This research tested competing predictions about the cognitive processes underlying the task-appropriate processing effect in prospective memory. Participants had to press a designated key whenever a word from the semantic category of animals or from the structural category of palindromes occurred in an ongoing lexical decision task. The availability of attentional resources was manipulated by varying the effort to the ongoing task in terms of speed or accuracy. In the task-appropriate semantic prospective memory task, performance was robust against the speed versus accuracy instructions. In the task-inappropriate structural prospective memory task, performance declined under speed instructions that detracted attentional resources. Accordingly, a facilitating effect of task-appropriate processing was observed under speed instructions but not accuracy instructions. The results support the notion that the task-appropriate processing effect is due to a larger contribution of automatic cue detection to prospective memory performance under task-appropriate than task-inappropriate conditions.

Notes

¹Additional analyses of the raw response latencies showed that neither the exclusion of response latencies differing from the individual means by more than 2 SDs nor the log-transformation affected the results and interpretations. The exclusion of extreme response latencies and the log-transformation are standard procedures in the analysis of reaction times (Ratcliff, 1993) that were applied to safeguard that the distributional assumptions of the asymptotic statistical tests were fulfilled. For ease of interpretation, Table 1 reports the mean reaction times before the log-transformation. Overall, the mean reaction times in the ongoing lexical decision task were similar to other studies that combined a lexical decision task with prospective memory demands (e.g., Smith, 2003).

²As explained earlier, only those trials entered the computation of response latencies that did not belong to the critical triads with target cues of the prospective memory task, in order to rule out any contaminating effects of cue detection and action initiation.

³Participants who showed latencies below and above the medians across the three levels of effort did not enter the analysis, which led to an exclusion of 35 participants (i.e., 18%).