Date of Award

2-17-2015

Document Type

Thesis and Dissertation

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Department of Psychology

First Advisor

Dawn M. McBride

Abstract

Prospective memory (PM) is the act of remembering to perform a future intention (Einstein & McDaniel, 2005). Time-based PM is remembering to retrieve that future intention at or after a specific time has elapsed. Event-based PM is remembering to retrieve the future intention when a specific cue or event is encountered (Sellen et al., 1997). The current project was designed to compare time- and event-based PM performance within a laboratory context. Previous research suggests that time-based tasks are more difficult to carry out because a decrease in performance (or PM cost) is often found compared with event-based tasks (e.g., Sellen et al., 1997). All participants completed a lexical decision task as the ongoing task. Participants in the event-based condition were asked to respond to a specific type of word for the PM task, and participants in the time-based task were asked to respond after a specific time has elapsed for the PM task. Delay between instruction and presentation of PM cue were manipulated in a completely between-subjects design. I hypothesized that participants would have higher PM accuracy when completing an event-based PM tasks than time-based PM tasks and a higher PM cost overall for the time-based than the event-based task. As the delay from instruction for the PM task and retrieval of the PM task increases, accuracy would decrease in both time and event-based tasks types. However, I also predicted a significant interaction between type of PM task and delay on PM accuracy and expected that delay would affect time-based task accuracy more strongly and result in a larger decrease in performance as delay increases. Overall, the current project contributes to our understanding of the differences in performance between time- and event-based PM tasks within a laboratory setting.

Comments

Imported from ProQuest Conte_ilstu_0092N_10429.pdf

Page Count

47

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