Peper Phil, Ball B Hunter
Department of Psychology, University of California, Riverside.
Department of Psychology, University of Texas at Arlington.
J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 2025 Jun 2. doi: 10.1037/xlm0001494.
Research in the retrospective memory domain has shown that individuals encode information less effortfully when expecting a reminder system (i.e., external store) to be available at the test. Critically, this expectation leads to worse memory performance when the reminder is unexpectedly removed. The present study examined whether these findings extend to prospective memory (PM) intentions, which are thought to maintain a privileged status in memory and therefore may be less sensitive to expectancy effects. Participants formed the intention to make a special PM response to target items across four ongoing task blocks. Study duration (Experiments 1 and 3), pupil size (Experiment 2), and self-report (Experiments 1-3) indexed encoding effort while learning these targets. Participants had reminders available across the first three blocks (i.e., targets listed at the top of the screen), but not on the fourth. Critically, only one condition was informed that they would not have a reminder prior to encoding targets in the fourth block. Results showed that expecting a reminder lowered objective (Experiments 1 and 3) and subjective (Experiments 1-3) encoding effort and reduced unaided PM retrieval (Experiments 1-3) in the fourth block, independent of memory load (Experiments 3). Objective (Experiments 1 and 3) and subjective (Experiments 1-3) effort also partially mediated the influence of expectations on unaided PM retrieval. These findings suggest PM and retrospective memory encoding operate similarly and that participants can alter learning to more effectively commit PM targets to memory when reminders are not expected. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).
回顾性记忆领域的研究表明，当个体预期在测试时有提醒系统（即外部存储）可用时，他们编码信息时会更省力。关键的是，当意外移除提醒时，这种预期会导致更差的记忆表现。本研究考察了这些发现是否适用于前瞻性记忆（PM）意图，前瞻性记忆意图被认为在记忆中具有特殊地位，因此可能对预期效应不太敏感。参与者在四个正在进行的任务块中形成了对目标项目做出特殊PM反应的意图。在学习这些目标时，研究持续时间（实验1和3）、瞳孔大小（实验2）和自我报告（实验1 - 3）作为编码努力程度的指标。在前三个任务块中，参与者可以看到提醒（即屏幕顶部列出的目标），但在第四个任务块中没有。关键的是，只有一种条件下的参与者在对第四个任务块中的目标进行编码之前被告知他们将没有提醒。结果表明，预期有提醒会降低第四个任务块中的客观（实验1和3）和主观（实验1 - 3）编码努力程度，并减少自发的PM检索（实验1 - 3），且与记忆负荷无关（实验3）。客观（实验1和3）和主观（实验1 - 3）努力程度也部分中介了预期对自发PM检索的影响。这些发现表明，PM和回顾性记忆编码的运作方式相似，并且当不预期有提醒时，参与者可以改变学习方式，以便更有效地将PM目标存储到记忆中。（PsycInfo数据库记录（c）2025美国心理学会，保留所有权利）
