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Related Experiment Video

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A Dual Task Procedure Combined with Rapid Serial Visual Presentation to Test Attentional Blink for Nontargets

A Dual Task Procedure Combined with Rapid Serial Visual Presentation to Test Attentional Blink for Nontargets

Published on: December 5, 2014

The specificity of prospective memory costs.

Anna-Lisa Cohen¹, Alexander Jaudas, Evan Hirschhorn

¹Department of Psychology, Yeshiva University, New York 10033, USA. acohen11@yu.edu

Memory (Hove, England)

|August 21, 2012

Summary

Prospective memory (PM) intentions interfere with ongoing tasks, but this interference is stimulus-specific. This means memory for intentions only impacts tasks involving similar stimuli, not general processing.

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Area of Science:

Cognitive Psychology
Neuroscience

Background:

Prospective memory (PM), or memory for intentions, is crucial for daily functioning.
A key debate in PM research concerns the degree to which intentions interfere with ongoing tasks.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate whether interference from prospective memory intentions is specific to intention-relevant stimuli or more general.
To identify the nature of stimulus-specific interference in prospective memory tasks.

Main Methods:

Participants completed a lexical decision task (LDT) with an embedded prospective memory (PM) task.
Reaction times were measured to assess interference costs.
Experiments manipulated the nature of PM targets (words vs. nonwords) and ongoing LDT stimuli.

Main Results:

Increased reaction time costs occurred when PM targets matched the type of ongoing stimuli (word/nonword).
When PM targets were words, costs were seen on word LDT trials, but not nonword trials.
When PM targets were nonwords, costs were observed on nonword LDT trials, not word trials.

Conclusions:

Task interference in prospective memory is stimulus-specific, depending on whether the intention relates to words or nonwords.
This finding is termed the Stimulus Specific Interference Effect (SSIE).
Evidence supports the specificity of interference, challenging more general interference accounts.