Predictors of Everyday Prospective Memory Performance: A Superiority in the Execution of Event-Based Tasks over Time-Based Tasks Reverses in Real-Life Situations

Prospective memories in the wild: Predicting memory for intentions in natural environments

“…Another important set of factors to be considered may be personal affective states. For example, state fluctuations in individual stress levels have been shown to negatively relate to intention fulfillment in previous ecological momentary assessment and diary studies of PM (Ihle et al, 2012 ; Wójcik et al, 2021 ). Interestingly, stress manipulations do not seem to affect PM performance in the laboratory (Möschl et al, 2017 )—another instance where divergent PM results have been obtained inside and outside the laboratory.…”

“…It is thus important to test whether variables that affect PM in the laboratory also impact PM in natural environments. Although insights regarding how the retrieval situation affects real-world intention fulfillment have been gained from using more naturalistic PM tasks in field experiments (e.g., asking participants to make a phone call; Kvavilashvili & Fisher, 2007 ) and studying participants’ own self-assigned intentions (see Schnitzspahn et al, 2016 ; Schnitzspahn et al, 2020 ), the present study is among the first to examine a variety of intention and person characteristics as predictors of participants’ abilities to fulfill their own everyday intentions (see also Wójcik et al, 2021 ).…”

“…Our participants had to list their intentions for the upcoming 5 days and, after 5 days had passed, they had to indicate which of these intentions they had actually completed. Similar ecological approaches have been developed in the 1990s by PM researchers (Ellis & Nimmo-Smith, 1993 ; Marsh et al, 1998 ) but have rarely been used since then, although they have been proven to be well suited to render ecological validity to laboratory results (Schnitzspahn et al, 2016 ; Wójcik et al, 2021 ).…”

“…Although real-world impact is certainly an important benchmark for any laboratory PM effect, and ideas regarding PM functioning are often inspired by real-world phenomena, very few empirical attempts have been made to reconnect laboratory findings on PM predictors to the real world. The only study that we are aware of is a study by Wójcik et al ( 2021 ). This study focused mainly on the characteristics of the intention retrieval situation in real life, such as whether the intention execution was associated with a certain time point (time-based PM) or a certain event (event-based PM), as well as some affect variables (e.g., stress), and demonstrated that a standard laboratory finding of superior performance in event-based tasks was not found in their sample.…”

I forgot that I forgot: PTSD symptom severity in a general population correlates with everyday diary-recorded prospective memory failures

“…Therefore, in-lab, event-based PM typically appears superior to time-based performance (e.g., Haines et al, 2020;Jager & Kliegel, 2008). However, recent research suggests this eventbased superiority reverses in real-life situations -people perform time-based tasks better (Wójcik et al, 2022). In everyday life, time-based tasks allow for greater aid use -for example, assigning an electronic reminder to take medication at 9 a.m., or for a 4 p.m. meeting.…”