We would like to thank Molly Magary and Michael Brodsky for their help in collecting the data.

Prospective memory refers to the planning, retention, retrieval, and execution of intentions for future behaviours and it is integral to the enterprise of daily living. Although prospective memory relies upon retrospective memory and executive processes often disrupted by pain, limited research has explored the influence of acute or chronic pain on the ability to complete prospective memory tasks. In the present study we investigated the influence of acute pain on prospective memory tasks that varied in their demands on executive processes (i.e., non-focal versus focal prospective memory cues). Complex-span working memory tasks were also administered to examine whether individual differences in working memory capacity moderated any negative impact of pain on prospective memory. Acute pain significantly impaired prospective memory performance in conditions that encouraged non-focal strategic processing of prospective memory cues, but not in conditions that encouraged more spontaneous focal processing. Individual differences in working memory capacity did not moderate the effect of acute pain on non-focal prospective memory. These findings provide new insights into prospective memory dysfunction created by painful experiences.

Output monitoring refers to memory for one's previously completed actions. In the context of prospective memory (PM) (e.g., remembering to take medication), failures of output monitoring can result in repetitions and omissions of planned actions (e.g., over- or under-medication). To be successful in output monitoring paradigms, participants must flexibly control attention to detect PM cues as well as engage controlled retrieval of previous actions whenever a particular cue is encountered. The current study examined individual differences in output monitoring abilities in a group of younger adults differing in attention control (AC) and episodic memory (EM) abilities. The results showed that AC ability uniquely predicted successful cue detection on the first presentation, whereas EM ability uniquely predicted successful output monitoring on the second presentation. The current study highlights the importance of examining external correlates of PM abilities and contributes to the growing body of research on individual differences in PM.

Pain affects the lives of many individuals by creating physical, psychological, and economic burdens. A critical psychological factor negatively affected by pain is one's ability to sustain attention. In order to better understand the effect of pain on sustained attention we conducted three experiments utilizing the psychomotor vigilance task, thought probes, and pupillometry. In Experiment 1, participants in acute pain exhibited overall poorer task performance. However, this effect was localized to the relative frequency and duration of the participants' slowest responses with their faster responses being equivalent to a no-pain control group. In Experiment 2, we replicated the procedure and included periodic thought probes to overtly measure subjective experiences during the task. Participants in pain reported fewer "ontask" thoughts and more thoughts directed toward the source of their pain. In Experiment 3, we replicated the procedure while simultaneously tracking pupillary dynamics using an eye-tracker.Participants in pain had smaller task-evoked pupillary responses, which is thought to be an indicator of task engagement. However, the behavioral effects of pain from Experiments 1 and 2 were not replicated in Experiment 3. Taken together, pain led to poorer performance in the form of an increase in the relative frequency and extremeness of slow responses, increases in off-task thoughts, and reductions in a physiological indicator of task engagement. These data speak to theories of how pain competes with task goals for attention and negatively impacts behavior. The broader implications of this work are the identification of a low-level mechanism by which pain can interfere with normal cognitive functioning.

A standard finding in the event-based prospective memory literature is that focal cues are more often detected than nonfocal cues. The multiprocess view of prospective memory accounts for this result by suggesting that dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) mediated executive processes are necessary for nonfocal cue detection while hippocampally mediated spontaneous retrieval processes support detection of focal cues. In agreement with the multiprocess view, previous studies have found that working memory capacity is predictive of prospective memory performance through detection of nonfocal cues, but non-predictive for focal cues. Because the DLPFC is known to support working memory maintenance, we predicted that anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) of the DLPFC would increase prospective memory cue detection for nonfocal cues when compared with a sham condition. Critically, we also expected an interaction between prospective memory cue type and stimulation such that anodal stimulation would not influence focal cue detection. Our results replicated the standard effect of improved focal compared to nonfocal cue detection. However, there was no significant effect between the sham and active tDCS conditions. Furthermore, we did not find the expected interaction between cue type and stimulation. Not only do our findings add onto the growing literature of tDCS experiments that failed to find stimulation effects to DLPFC, but it is also one of the first studies to incorporate prospective memory with tDCS.