Is prospective memory enhanced by cue-action semantic relatedness and enactment at encoding?
Benefits and costs on prospective memory performance, of enactment at encoding and a semantic association between a cue-action word pair, were investigated in two experiments. Findings revealed superior performance for both younger and older adults following enactment, in contrast to verbal encoding, and when cue-action semantic relatedness was high. Although younger adults outperformed older adults, age did not moderate benefits of cue-action relatedness or enactment. Findings from a second experiment revealed that the inclusion of an instruction to perform a prospective memory task led to increments in response latency to items from the ongoing activity in which that task was embedded, relative to latencies when the ongoing task only was performed. However, this task interference 'cost' did not differ as a function of either cue-action relatedness or enactment. We argue that the high number of cue-action pairs employed here influenced meta-cognitive consciousness, hence determining attention allocation, in all experimental conditions.
Institute of Molecular Medicine, University of Lisbon, Portugal. aspereira@fm.ul.pt
Antonina
A
Pereira
Judi
J
Ellis
Jayne
J
Freeman
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D003463:Cues; D006801:Humans; D061212:Memory, Episodic; D008875:Middle Aged; D011930:Reaction Time; D012660:Semantics; D014706:Verbal Learning; D055815:Young Adult