The effects of implementation intention strategies on prospective memory cue encoding

ABSTRACT

Implementation intentions, which include a structured verbal statement and mental imagery, improve prospective memory performance (i.e. remembering to execute delayed intentions). To investigate whether, and how, implementation intention strategies affect encoding processes we had participants complete a thought probe procedure immediately after forming the intention to remember to press Q when seeing fruit words. In Experiment 1, an implementation intention verbal statement (relative to control statement) significantly increased generation of high typicality exemplars (apple, banana, orange). In Experiment 2, an implementation intention imagery procedure (relative to control imagery) produced similar outcomes. In Experiment 3, combining the statement and imagery components of the implementation intention (relative to control statement and imagery) demonstrated even more potent effects (e.g. three-fold increase in fruit exemplars generated). In Experiment 4, we tested whether the control statement versus control imagery procedure differentially affected encoding, but these control procedures showed no significant differences. An interesting, unanticipated finding was that there was significantly less mind wandering in the implementation intention conditions relative to the control conditions. The current experiments provide novel information on the processes operating during intention encoding, and support the classic view that implementation intentions increase the encoding of specific retrieval cues.

KEYWORDS:

• Prospective memory
• encoding strategy
• categorical cue
• cue focality
• encoding specificity

Acknowledgements

Portions of this project were presented at the 2016 Meeting of the Psychonomic Society. We are thankful to Toshi Miyatsu for his assistance with portions of this project, and to Ann Iftikhar, Erika Arvidson, Elysse Reyes, and Rachel Sangster for their assistance with data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Traditionally, implementation intentions only involved a verbal statement (e.g. Gollwitzer, 1999), but imagery is now considered to be an “optional” component of the implementation intention strategy (Cohen & Gollwitzer, 2008, p. 379).

2 Classic-view theorists have not explicitly stated whether implementation intention encoding should affect categorical-cue prospective memory tasks. Nevertheless, we believe the prediction of greater cue specificity during encoding is a reasonable deduction based upon the classic view.

3 Participants were not instructed that the prospective memory phase would last only 5 minutes. The unrelated experiments focused on reading comprehension, speech ambiguity, and juror decision-making. None of those experiments tested prospective memory and none of them used fruit stimuli.

Additional information

Funding

M. K. S. was partially supported by a Sleep Research Society Foundation Early Career Development Grant.