The importance of cue familiarity and cue distinctiveness in prospective memory

Both retrospective cued-memory tasks and event-based prospective memory tasks require that cue and target information be associated, and that aspects of that association be reinstated for successful remembering. These functional similarities between retrospective memory and prospective memory were the bases for the hypothesis that the familiarity and the distinctiveness of the target event (cue) would influence prospective memory performance. Experiment 1, focusing on target familiarity, found a nominal advantage in prospective memory with unfamiliar target events. Experiment 2 showed a significant benefit for unfamiliar target events, as well as for target events that were distinctive relative to the local context. Additionally, prospective memory performance did not reliably correlate with explicit retrospective memory tasks (recall and recognition), but did correlate with an indirect retrospective memory task (word fragment completion). This pattern suggests and helps specify the general view that prospective memory processes may be similar to those involved in both direct and indirect tests of retrospective memory.