title: The role of metacognition in prospective memory: anticipated task demands influence attention allocation strategies.
abstract: The present study investigates how individuals distribute their attentional resources between a prospective memory task and an ongoing task. Therefore, metacognitive expectations about the attentional demands of the prospective-memory task were manipulated while the factual demands were held constant. In Experiments 1a and 1b, we found attentional costs from a prospective-memory task with low factual demands to be significantly reduced when information about the low to-be-expected demands were provided, while prospective-memory performance remained largely unaffected. In Experiment 2, attentional monitoring in a more demanding prospective-memory task also varied with information about the to-be-expected demands (high vs. low) and again there were no equivalent changes in prospective-memory performance. These findings suggest that attention-allocation strategies of prospective memory rely on metacognitive expectations about prospective-memory task demands. Furthermore, the results suggest that attentional monitoring is only functional for prospective memory to the extent to which anticipated task demands reflect objective task demands.
authors.affiliation: University of Mannheim, School of Social Sciences, Mannheim, Germany. Electronic address: rummel@uni-mannheim.de.
authors.forename: Jan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Rummel
authors.forename: Thorsten
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Meiser
mesh_terms: D059031:Anticipation, Psychological; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008568:Memory / Q000502:physiology; D061212:Memory, Episodic
keywords: Attention allocation; Metacognition; Monitoring processes; Prospective memory