Intentions enacted: what role for prospective memory?

Abstract

The complexity of our everyday lives often requires that an intended action needs to be postponed until a more opportune moment arises in which the delayed intention can be completed. Different cognitive mechanisms contribute to the successful remembering of delayed intentions, from the time the intention is formed, during the retention interval until finally it is retrieved and completed. The objective of this thesis was to look at how an intended action is represented and how the nature of the representation relates to subsequent retrieval. Chapter one begins with an overview of the literature and highlights the different stages of prospective memory. The two key areas to this thesis, namely the literature concerning the enactment effect and the intention superiority effect are introduced and reviewed. The second half of this chapter described different methodological approaches and introduces the paradigms relevant to this thesis. Finally, the specific questions and aims of the experiments were briefly overviewed. Intended enactment was compared to overt enactment in order to examine whether similar processes underlie the retrospective and prospective memory for actions. In chapter two this comparison was explored in terms of recall in memory whereas in chapter three the activation state of enacted and intended actions was investigated using a recognition latency paradigm. The results of chapter two indicated that intended enactment does not convey an advantage to memory for the content of the actions, whereas, the reliable enactment advantage was replicated. In chapter three, a heightened level of activation was found for both enacted and intended actions. A similarity in the underlying representations was proposed, with motoric information present in both enacted and intended contributing to the increased accessibility in memory. Additionally, a cost effect on a secondary task was found as a result of maintaining the intended action at a heightened level of activation. Chapter four explored whether age-related decrements in prospective memory result from decreased accessibility to intention-related material The results indicated that older adults benefited from both the enacted and intended enactment advantage but evidence of demands on more limited resources were suggested. Together the findings of chapters two, three and four indicated that similar properties characterize the representation of overt and intended actions but they act upon memory differentially, with additional processes specific to the prospective component of delayed intentions. Finally in chapter five, the effects of the duration of the delay and the effect of elaborating the context of an intended action were explored. The findings point towards different demands necessary in maintaining an intention over a shorter period of time compared to longer retention intervals. Indications of the importance in specifying the retrieval context when forming longer-term intentions were observed. In the last chapter, the goals of the thesis were reviewed with suggestion for future directions in understanding intentions.