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Event-based prospective memory (PM) involves remembering to perform intended actions after a delay. An important theoretical issue is whether and how people monitor the environment to execute an intended action when a target event occurs. Performing a PM task often increases the latencies in ongoing tasks. However, little is known about the reasons for this cost effect. This study uses diffusion model analysis to decompose monitoring processes in the PM paradigm. Across 4 experiments, performing a PM task increased latencies in an ongoing lexical decision task. A large portion of this effect was explained by consistent increases in boundary separation; additional increases in nondecision time emerged in a nonfocal PM task and explained variance in PM performance (Experiment 1), likely reflecting a target-checking strategy before and after the ongoing decision (Experiment 2). However, we found that possible target-checking strategies may depend on task characteristics. That is, instructional emphasis on the importance of ongoing decisions (Experiment 3) or the use of focal targets (Experiment 4) eliminated the contribution of nondecision time to the cost of PM, but left participants in a mode of increased cautiousness. The modeling thus sheds new light on the cost effect seen in many PM studies and suggests that people approach ongoing activities more cautiously when they need to remember an intended action.

Cognitive process models, such as Ratcliff’s (1978) diffusion model, are useful tools for examining cost- or interference effects in event-based prospective memory (PM). The diffusion model includes several parameters that provide insight into how and why ongoing-task performance may be affected by a PM task and is ideally suited to analyze performance because both reaction time and accuracy are taken into account. Separate analyses of these measures can easily yield misleading interpretations in cases of speed-accuracy tradeoffs. The diffusion model allows us to measure possible criterion shifts and is thus an important methodological improvement over standard analyses. Performance in an ongoing lexical decision task (Smith, 2003) was analyzed with the diffusion model. The results suggest that criterion shifts play an important role when a PM task is added, but do not fully explain the cost effect on RT.

While first studies suggested that emotional task material may enhance prospective memory performance in young and older adults, the extent and mechanisms of this effect are under debate. The authors explored possible differential effects of cue valence on the prospective and retrospective component of prospective memory in young and older adults. Forty-five young and 41 older adults performed a prospective memory task in which emotional valence of the prospective memory cue was manipulated (positive, negative, neutral). The multinomial model of event-based prospective memory was used to analyze effects of valence and age on the two prospective memory components separately. Results revealed an interaction indicating that age differences were smaller in both emotional valence conditions. For older adults positive cues improved the prospective component, while negative cues improved the retrospective component. No main effect of valence was found for younger adults on an overt accuracy measure, but model-based analyses showed that the retrospective component was enhanced in the positive compared with the negative cue condition. The study extends the literature in demonstrating that processes underlying emotional effects on prospective memory may differ depending on valence and age.

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People often slow down their ongoing activities when they must remember an intended action, known as the cost- or interference effect of prospective memory (PM). Only few studies have examined adult age differences in PM interference, and the specific reasons underlying such differences are not well understood. The authors used a model-based approach to reveal processes underlying PM interference and age differences in these processes. Older and younger adults first performed a block of an ongoing lexical decision task alone. An embedded event-based PM task was added in a second block. Simultaneously accounting for the changes in RT distributions and error rates induced by the PM task, Ratcliff’s (1978) diffusion model was used to decompose the nonlinear combination of speed and accuracy into psychologically meaningful components. Remembering an intention not only reduced processing efficiency in both age groups, but also prolonged peripheral nondecision time and increased response cautiousness. Overall, the findings suggest that there are multiple, but qualitatively similar reasons underlying PM-task interference in both age groups.

Judgments about objects in the world are often based on probabilistic information (or cues). A frugal judgment strategy that utilizes memory (i.e., the ability to discriminate between known and unknown objects) as a cue for inference is the recognition heuristic (RH). The usefulness of the RH depends on the structure of the environment, particularly the predictive power (validity) of recognition. Little is known about developmental differences in use of the RH. In this study, the authors examined (a) to what extent children and adolescents recruit the RH when making judgments, and (b) around what age adaptive use of the RH emerges. Primary schoolchildren (M = 9 years), younger adolescents (M = 12 years), and older adolescents (M = 17 years) made comparative judgments in task environments with either high or low recognition validity. Reliance on the RH was measured with a hierarchical multinomial model. Results indicated that primary schoolchildren already made systematic use of the RH. However, only older adolescents adaptively adjusted their strategy use between environments and were better able to discriminate between situations in which the RH led to correct versus incorrect inferences. These findings suggest that the use of simple heuristics does not progress unidirectionally across development but strongly depends on the task environment, in line with the perspective of ecological rationality. Moreover, adaptive heuristic inference seems to require experience and a developed base of domain knowledge. (PsycINFO Database Record

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