Experimental tests of prospective remembering: the influence of cue-event frequency on performance

During recent years there has been an upsurge of interest in the processes underlying success or failure of intentions to perform an action in the future e.g. carry out an errand for a friend. Much of this research focuses on simulating these delayed-intention or prospective-memory tasks in the laboratory. A currently popular variant of these tasks is a repeated-instance event-based one in which the same action should be performed whenever a particular (repeated) event-cue occurs during an ongoing activity (e.g. a word in a running memory test of word recall). We report two experiments that investigated important dimensions of this task design, along which recent experimental tasks differ considerably, and explored their influence on prospective remembering. The results revealed that the variations in the event-cue frequencies explored here did not influence overall performance: relatively high event-cue frequency did not improve prospective remembering. However, performance was lower when event-cues were embedded in a general knowledge test than when a prose-reading task was used. Moreover, when remembering was compared for the first and final set of event-cues there was evidence for improvement over presentations during the general knowledge task and a contrasting decline using the prose task, under high event-cue frequency conditions only. The results have important repercussions for current experimental design and the development of tests of prospective remembering skills in particular population subgroups.