The Mechanism And Influence Factors Of Prospective Memory: Developmental Perspective

In recent years, the researchers began to focus on the memories in life along with the improvement of research on it. Prospective memory is from one of them. The key question in prospective memory field is to reveal the process of self-initiation retrieval of intention. The study mainly explored the process mechanism and influence factors of prospective memory as well as explored the relationship between consciousness and unconsciousness in the process of prospective memory.In the Chapter 1- Introduction, we reviewed the simple history of memory research. Then, the study introduced the development in the prospective memory field. Finally, we expounded basic theory issues on the conception, the process, sorts and method of prospective memory. In the Chapter 2- Question part, the study firstly analyzed and discussed the research status on prospective memory, then advanced three questions that will be focused on in the study: 1) the prospective memory developmental mechanism on children and adolescence; 2) the influence factors on prospective memory; 3) the process mechanism of prospective memory. The Chapter 3 is the experimental study which is the central part in the study, and there are six experiments in the part.The Experiment One mainly reviewed the development stage of children prospective memory by controlling the age and retrospective memory task loads; in the Experiment Two, the study explored the interruption effect by modifying the position of the target event appeared in the task sequence; in the Experiment Three, we firstly explored the prospective memory development of children by computer tasks as well as explored if the focal process effect can improve the prospective memory performance of preschoolers; in the Experiment Four, the research explored the prospective memory development of adolescence by emphasizing the ongoing task and prospective memory task with the different instructions respectively; the Experiment Five further explored the divided attention and focal process effect on the prospective memory performance of adolescence by adding audio interruption task; in the end, in the Experiment Six, we researched on the effects of characteristics of cues, reminders and the audio interruption task on the college student's prospective memory for further exploring the process mechanism of prospective memory.