The Effect Of Disruptive Task Cognitive Load And Contextual Relationship On Delayed Execution Of Prospective Memory Performance

Doctors, nurses, or pilots usually have a great amount of complicated tasks to do in their daily life, and the tasks could to be switched from one to another, Further, during switching among the tasks, a lot of interruption tasks could happen, which makes more prospective memory tasks. Thus, exploring the mechanism and influence factors of the performance of prospective memory on the condition of tasks switching and having interruption task, which will give instructive significance to our real life.Researchers have done studies about the influence of interruption tasks to the performance of prospective memory task, but we still don’t know exactly which factors of interruption task itself make contribution to the prospective memory task performance. To fill up this blank, here we did experiments to explore the cognitive workload of interruption task to the performance of prospective memory task. Given to different tasks will switch from one to another, the context of each tasks could be quite different, previous studies have found the influence of contextual expection, contextual reinstatement, task appropriate processing, contextual emotional valence, to the performance of prospective memory task. But there is no research about how the association of different contexts will affect the performance of prospective memory task, and there existing different contexts in our real life. This paper explored the influence of the context association to the performance of prospective memory by doing experiments simulating real life prospective memory scenario.In this study, we used a delayed-execute paradigm of prospective memory (McDaniel & Einstein,2000) to study the prospective memory. The study was mainly composed of two experiments:Exp1 explored the influence of prospective memory cue position context reinstatement and the workload of interruption task on the performance of prospective memory task. Results found interaction effect between prospective memory cue position and context reinstatement, which indicated that when the cue appeared before interruption task, reinstating the interrupted task has better performance of prospective memory task than not reinstated, when the cue appeared during the interruption task, reinstating the interrupted task has worse performance of prospective memory task than not reinstated, there is no influence of the workload of interruption task on the performance of prospective memory task. Exp2 explored the influence of workload of interruption task on the performance of prospective memory again, and took consideration of context association by setting the same or not context and context reinstatement as factors. Results indicated no influence of the workload of interruption task on the performance of prospective memory task, when under the same context, whether reinstating the interrupted context has no influence on the performance of prospective memory task, when under the different context, reinstating the interrupted task context has worse performance than not reinstatement.This paper made a conclusion according to the results of Expl and Exp2:(1) The workload of interruption task has no influence on the performance of prospective memory.(2) Reinstating the context can influence the performance of prospective memory task, reinstating the interrupted task context can improve the performance of prospective memory, but only on condition that the prospective memory cue appeared before the interrupted task and without the existing of the context uniformity. On the contrary, reinstatement has negative effect.(3) Same interrupted task context and interruption task has negative effect on the performance of prospective memory task.