Effects Of Task Difficulty,Self-efficacy And Implementation Intention On College Students’ Prospective Memory

Prospective Memory(PM)is the ability to remember future activities and events that need to be completed,in order to reflect an individual’s intention to delay memory.In recent years,what factors will affect the performance of prospective memory and effective strategies to improve prospective memory ability have gradually received attention from researchers,and have become a hot topic in prospective memory research.There are also many different analyses and discussions on how individual differences affect prospective memory,such as cognitive style,Personality type,etc.As one of the important individual differences,self-efficacy is still unclear in research on the relationship between self-efficacy and prospective memory.It is unclear whether there are differences in prospective memory performance among college students with different levels of self-efficacy under different task difficulty conditions,and it is worth further exploration.By using execution intention as a strategy,individuals can effectively regulate themselves,strengthen the psychological connection between target cues and intentional behavior,and thus increase the likelihood of smooth implementation of target behavior.At present,many studies have confirmed the effectiveness of implementation intention in the field of prospective memory,believing that the execution of this strategy can improve the prospective memory of different types of groups.However,it is still unclear whether it can have a promoting effect on low self-efficacy level college students.Therefore,based on the dual task paradigm,this study designed three studies to explore the effects of task difficulty,self-efficacy,and implementation intention on college students’ prospective memory,in order to provide research ideas for the influencing factors and regulatory strategies of prospective memory.Study 1 is a mixed experiment of two factors,i.e.2(self-efficacy: low efficiency and high efficiency)×2(difficulty of ongoing task: low and high),to explore the effects of difficulty of ongoing task and self-efficacy on prospective memory of college students.Study 2 is a mixed experiment of three factors.On the basis of study 1,the difficulty of prospective task is increased,i.e.2(self-efficacy: low efficiency and high efficiency)× 2(difficulty of ongoing task: low and high)×2(difficulty of prospective task:low and high),to explore the effects of difficulty of ongoing task,difficulty of prospective task and self-efficacy on prospective memory of college students.The third study is a three-factor mixed experiment of 2(implementation intentions: standard coding and implementation intentions coding)×2(task difficulty in progress: low and high)×2(prospective task difficulty: low and high),to explore whether the prospective memory level of college students with low self-efficacy can be significantly improved under the effect of implementation intentions under different task difficulty and prospective task difficulty.The results are as follows:(1)The main effect of difficulty in ongoing tasks and difficulty in prospective tasks is significant.The difficulty in ongoing tasks and difficulty in prospective tasks can have a significant impact on the performance of prospective memory.Compared to high difficulty in ongoing tasks and high difficulty in prospective tasks,prospective memory performance is better under low difficulty in ongoing tasks and low difficulty in prospective tasks;(2)The main effect of self-efficacy is significant.Regardless of the difficulty of the ongoing and prospective tasks,self-efficacy has a significant impact on the performance of prospective memory.Compared to low self-efficacy level college students,high self-efficacy level college students perform better in prospective memory;(3)The main effect of implementation intention is significant,and the regulatory strategy of forming implementation intention can significantly improve the prospective memory performance of college students with low self-efficacy levels;(4)College students with different levels of self-efficacy will adopt different processing methods based on different task characteristics when performing prospective memory tasks,which is in line with the dual processing theory.