title: Is it relevant? Influence of trial manipulations of prospective memory context on task interference.
abstract: Prospective memory (PM) research has often investigated if having an intention interferes with ongoing activities, but rarely by linking the intention to a particular context. We examined effects of trial-by-trial changes in whether the context (defined by colour) was relevant for the nonfocal PM task. The ongoing task involved speeded decisions about the position (left/right) of the upper-case letter in a pair, and the PM task consisted of pressing an additional key if the upper-case and lower-case letters were in a specified colour and the same letter. Trials switched between two colours either randomly or predictably in eight-trial blocks. We also manipulated the presence/absence of occasional same-letter pairs in the irrelevant context. Results showed higher cost of having a nonfocal PM task when ongoing stimuli matched than when they mismatched the target's colour. Moreover, cost for intention-irrelevant stimuli was minimized, though never eliminated, by blocking match/mismatch trials. These findings highlight the role that local changes in intention-related context play in task interference and support a view of monitoring as a flexible mechanism. Additionally, the study introduced a novel way of embedding intention-related events in the irrelevant context shortly before the occurrence of PM targets, with results tentatively suggesting that such events might impair target detection.
authors: a Department of Psychology , University of Warwick , Coventry , UK.
authors: Joana S
authors: JS
authors: Lourenço
authors: Elizabeth A
authors: EA
authors: Maylor
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001244:Association; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D003118:Color Perception; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D033182:Intention; D008297:Male; D061212:Memory, Episodic; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology; D011930:Reaction Time; D055815:Young Adult