The Effect Of Reminders On Prospective Memory

Prospective memory is a type of memory in which an individual must remember to perform an intended activity at some designated point in the future (Brandimonte at el., 1997. In 1901, Freud provided an interesting analysis for prospective memory in his work. However, there were few studies on prospective memory before 1970s, and prospective memory was considered as a kind of task of memory but it wasn't considered as an independent field of memory compared with retrospective memory. During 1970s and 1980s, researchers had done some studies and gotten some descriptive data about prospective memory. Because most of them used field investigation method, some unrelated variables couldn't be completely controlled. In 1990, Einstein and McDaniel developed a laboratory research paradigm to study prospective memory and avoided of the defectives of previous research. The following paradigm has been generally used in studying prospective memory. Subjects are first given instructions for what they think is the primary task of the experiment. The prospective memory task is embedded within this "cover" activity. This is intended to simulate real-world prospective memory tasks in which people are busily engaged in activities that they must remember to interrupt at an appropriate point in order to do another intended activity. After the instructions for the cover task, subjects are then given the instructions for the prospective memory task. This often involves asking the subjects to do something (e.g. pressing a key) whenever they see a particular word in the context of the cover task (Einstein, Holland, McDaniel, & Guyun, 1992; Einstein & McDaniel, 1990; McDaniel & Einstein, 1993) . Following the instructions for the prospective memory task, one or more intervening tasks are presented to discourage continuous maintenance of the prospective memory instruction throughout the experiment. Finally, the cover activity is presented, with no mention of the prospective memory task, and subjects' success in remembering to perform the prospective memory task is assessed.In recent years, there have been many studies about effect of various factors on prospective memory and some theoretical views and models can be used in explaining the processing mechanism of prospective memory, in which there are familiarity-retrieval model, simple activated model, strategic and automatic processingmodel and so on. Some studies supported one of these models and they were contradicted to the others. So there are controversies about processing mechanism of prospective memory.Prospective memory is a phenomenon in which people often experience, and most failures about memory are relative to prospective memory. This research is intended to study the effects of reminders on prospective memory, the effects of various retention intervals between the presence of reminder and the appearance of target event on prospective memory and to study the processing mechanism of prospective memory. Following the Einstein and McDaniel (1990) paradigm, this research includes three experiments in which the cover task is a short-time memory task and prospective memory task is asking the subjects to press a key when they see the particular word in the course of cover task. All the words in cover task including target words of memory are selected from Guynn, McDaniel and Einstein's (2001) research.This research is intended to test the following hypothesis:(1) Without the presence of target events (words) and the desired action in reminders, whether only target reminders will benefit prospective memory(experiment 1) .(2) Without the presence of target and the desired action in reminders, whether the reminders of only target events (words), and of both target events and prospective memory task will benefit prospective memory (experiment 2) .(3) With the presence of target events (words) and desired action , whether the reminders of only target event (words), only desired action and both target event and desired action will respective...