School of Psychology, The University of Western Australia, Crawley, WA 6009, Australia.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2012 Dec;19(6):1142-7. doi: 10.3758/s13423-012-0303-1.
Remembering to perform deferred actions when events are encountered in the future is referred to as event-based prospective memory. Individuals can be slower to respond to ongoing tasks when they have prospective memory task requirements. These costs are interpreted as evidence for cognitive control processes allocated to the prospective memory task, but we know little about these processes. In the present article, the recognition of nontargets previously presented in an ongoing task with prospective memory task requirements provided evidence for the differential processing of individual ongoing task items. Participants performed a lexical decision task, where some participants were required to make an alternative prospective memory response either to a specific word (focal) or to exemplars of a category (nonfocal). Participants were slower to respond to the ongoing task in the nonfocal conditions than in the control condition (costs), regardless of whether or not prospective memory task importance was emphasized. Participants were also slower to respond to the ongoing task in the focal conditions than in the control condition, but only when prospective memory task importance was emphasized. This task was followed by a surprise recognition memory test in which nontarget words from the lexical decision task were intermixed with new words. Focal conditions, but not nonfocal conditions, showed better discrimination on the recognition task, as compared with the control condition. Participants in nonfocal conditions mapped the semantic features of the ongoing task letter strings onto the semantic features of their prospective memory category, and this elaboration in the processing of individual nontargets increased incidental learning and produced the recognition benefit.
当未来发生事件时，记住执行延迟动作被称为基于事件的前瞻性记忆。当个体有前瞻性记忆任务要求时，他们对正在进行的任务的反应可能会变慢。这些成本被解释为分配给前瞻性记忆任务的认知控制过程的证据，但我们对这些过程知之甚少。在本文中，具有前瞻性记忆任务要求的先前在进行中的任务中的非目标的识别为个体进行中的任务项目的差异处理提供了证据。参与者执行词汇判断任务，其中一些参与者被要求对特定单词（焦点）或类别示例（非焦点）做出替代的前瞻性记忆反应。与对照条件相比，无论是否强调前瞻性记忆任务的重要性，非焦点条件下参与者对进行中的任务的反应都较慢（成本）。与对照条件相比，焦点条件下参与者对进行中的任务的反应也较慢，但仅当强调前瞻性记忆任务的重要性时才如此。紧随其后的是一个惊喜的识别记忆测试，其中词汇判断任务中的非目标单词与新单词混合在一起。与对照条件相比，焦点条件在识别任务中表现出更好的辨别能力，而非焦点条件则没有。非焦点条件下的参与者将正在进行的任务字母串的语义特征映射到他们的前瞻性记忆类别上的语义特征上，这种对单个非目标的处理的详细说明增加了偶然学习，并产生了识别益处。
