Location-based prospective memory

Abstract

This study explores location-based prospective memory. People often have to remember to do things when in a particular location, such as buying tissues the next time they are in the supermarket. For event cognition theory, location is important for structuring events. However, because event cognition has not been used to examine prospective memory, the question remains of how multiple events will influence prospective memory performance. In our experiments, people delivered messages from store to store in a virtual shopping mall as an ongoing task. The prospective tasks were to do certain activities in certain stores. For Experiment 1, each trial involved one prospective memory task to be done in a single location at one of three delays. The virtual environment and location cues were effective for prospective memory, and performance was unaffected by delay. For Experiment 2, each trial involved two prospective memory tasks, given in either one or two instruction locations, and to be done in either one or two store locations. There was improved performance when people received instructions from two locations and did both tasks in one location relative to other combinations. This demonstrates that location-based event structure influences how well people perform on prospective memory tasks.

Encoding and referent event influence on retrospective memory

“…Comparisons across the four conditions revealed that, consistent with the O’Rear and Radvansky (2019) prospective memory data, response times to the 3E-1R condition were faster than those in the 1E-1R, 1E-3R, and 3E-3R conditions, F (1, 49) = 15.98, MSE = 143,850, p < .001, η normalp 2 = . 25 , F (1, 49) = 57.02, MSE = 108,327, p < .001, η normalp 2 = . 54 , and F (1, 49) = 21.20, MSE = 107,127, p < .001, η normalp 2 = . 30 , respectively. Thus, memory was best when information about a single event was encountered across multiple events, consistent with an Event Structure view.…”

“…For the Event Cognition view (O’Rear & Radvansky, 2019), memory will be better when multiple learning events refer to a common event as compared with other conditions. That is, relative to the other combinations of learning and referent events, memory will be better when there are multiple learning events (study sentences presented singly) that refer to a common event (Single Location condition).…”

“…These data were submitted to a 2 (Studied vs Nonstudied) × 4 (Condition) repeated-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA). 1 After this, planned comparisons were made among the various conditions following O’Rear and Radvansky (2019). For the main ANOVA, there was a main effect of Studied-Nonstudied, F (1, 49) = 38.05, MSE = 171,628, p < .001, η normalp 2 = . 44 , with people responding faster to Studied probes ( M = 1,627 ms; SE = 34) than to nonstudied probes ( M = 1,882 ms; SE = 40).…”

“…Of central interest here is a study by O’Rear and Radvansky (2019, Experiment 2) on prospective memory that assessed event structure and memory performance. For this study, people navigated a virtual mall doing an ongoing task, and when they arrived in target locations, they were to recall prospective memory tasks.…”

Naturalistic assessments in virtual reality and in real life help resolve the age-prospective memory paradox

“…Additionally, it is critical that individuals navigate virtual environments in the same manner as they do in the real world. Many VR-based PM studies on healthy adults, including those using HMDs, predominantly utilize keyboards, joysticks, or touchscreens to allow movement in the virtual environment (Debartnot et al, 2015;O'rear & Radvansky, 2018;Parsons & Barnett, 2017, Okahashi et al, 2013, Sakai et al, 2018. Participants are often seated and static throughout the experiment.…”