Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Washington University, Saint Louis, MO, 63130, USA.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2018 Aug;25(4):1405-1415. doi: 10.3758/s13423-018-1442-9.
Monitoring the environment for the occurrence of prospective memory (PM) targets is a resource-demanding process that produces cost (e.g., slower responding) to ongoing activities. However, research suggests that individuals are able to monitor strategically by using contextual cues to reduce monitoring in contexts in which PM targets are not expected to occur. In the current study, we investigated the processes supporting context identification (i.e., determining whether or not the context is appropriate for monitoring) by testing the context cue focality hypothesis. This hypothesis predicts that the ability to monitor strategically depends on whether the ongoing task orients attention to the contextual cues that are available to guide monitoring. In Experiment 1, participants performed an ongoing lexical decision task and were told that PM targets (TOR syllable) would only occur in word trials (focal context cue condition) or in items starting with consonants (nonfocal context cue condition). In Experiment 2, participants performed an ongoing first letter judgment (consonant/vowel) task and were told that PM targets would only occur in items starting with consonants (focal context cue condition) or in word trials (nonfocal context cue condition). Consistent with the context cue focality hypothesis, strategic monitoring was only observed during focal context cue conditions in which the type of ongoing task processing automatically oriented attention to the relevant features of the contextual cue. These findings suggest that strategic monitoring is dependent on limited-capacity processing resources and may be relatively limited when the attentional demands of context identification are sufficiently high.
监测潜在记忆 (PM) 目标出现的环境是一个资源密集型过程，会对正在进行的活动产生成本（例如，反应速度变慢）。然而，研究表明，个体能够通过使用上下文线索进行策略性监测，从而减少在预计不会出现 PM 目标的环境中进行监测。在当前研究中，我们通过测试上下文线索焦点假设来研究支持上下文识别的过程（即，确定上下文是否适合监测）。该假设预测，策略性监测的能力取决于正在进行的任务是否将注意力集中在可用于指导监测的上下文线索上。在实验 1 中，参与者执行了一个正在进行的词汇判断任务，并被告知 PM 目标（TOR 音节）仅在单词试验中出现（焦点上下文线索条件）或在以辅音开头的项目中出现（非焦点上下文线索条件）。在实验 2 中，参与者执行了一个正在进行的首字母判断（辅音/元音）任务，并被告知 PM 目标仅在以辅音开头的项目中出现（焦点上下文线索条件）或在单词试验中出现（非焦点上下文线索条件）。与上下文线索焦点假设一致，只有在焦点上下文线索条件下才观察到策略性监测，在这些条件下，正在进行的任务处理的类型会自动将注意力集中到上下文线索的相关特征上。这些发现表明，策略性监测取决于有限的处理资源，并且当上下文识别的注意力需求足够高时，可能相对有限。
