Toward an understanding of motivational influences on prospective memory using value-added intentions

Abstract

This study examined value-added intentions by manipulating the cognitive frame associated with monetary contingencies for detecting prospective memory (PM) cues. We associated a loss-frame with a monetary punishment for failing to respond to cues and a gain-frame with a monetary reward for remembering to respond to cues and compared those frames to a no-frame control condition with no contingency linked to performance. Across two experiments, we find increased PM performance for participants in the loss-frame (Experiments 1 and 2) and in the gain-frame (Experiment 2) conditions relative to the no-frame condition. This value-related improvement in PM was not accompanied by a significant increase in cue monitoring as measured by intention-induced interference to an ongoing task and recognition memory for ongoing-task items. The few previous studies investigating motivational PM showed mixed results regarding whether PM improves due to incentives or not. Our results provide further evidence that, under some experimental conditions, PM improves with rewards and that the benefit generalizes to penalizing performance. The results have both practical implications and theoretical implications for motivation models of PM.

The Role of Extrinsic Rewards and Cue-Intention Association in Prospective Memory in Young Children

“…[ 12 ]). For example, other recent studies which also did not find a cost to OT, despite a positive ‘importance’ effect on the PM task in Parkinson’s patients, or positive effects of monetary incentives in healthy populations ([ 34 , 50 ] respectively) posited it is possible that increased personal importance of the intention resulted in a stronger encoding of the PM cues at the time of instruction, thus facilitating PM cue retrieval without requiring further attentional resources, a notion further supported by the motivational-cognitive model of Penningroth and Scott [ 33 ]. It would be interesting to investigate this further by increasing the demand/difficulty of the OT, and observe how this interacts with rewards.…”

“…It seems plausible then, that if motivation was achieved via more extrinsic motivators, such as incentives, then the same positive motivation effects could be expected. Indeed, positive effects of monetary incentives have recently been found in healthy adults [ 34 ] and adolescents with traumatic brain injury [ 35 , 36 ]. However, only one study to date has investigated the effect of incentives, rather than the use of more intrinsically motivating tasks, on PM performance in young children [ 23 ] and they did not find a positive effect.…”

Effects of Material and Non-Material Rewards on Remembering to Do Things for Others

“…In the past decades, research on the cognitive mechanisms underlying PM has made enormous progress (see Brandimonte et al, 1996 ; Kliegel et al, 2008 ). However, some researchers have recently noticed (Ellis and McGann, 2005 ; Brandimonte and Ferrante, 2008 ; Altgassen et al, 2010 ; Brandimonte et al, 2010 ; Cook et al, 2015 ) that investigating this important aspect of everyday life only in terms of a cognitive analysis neglects the fundamental social and motivational components of this activity (see also Meacham and Kushner, 1980 ). Indeed, whereas there is a large body of empirical studies that investigated the cognitive processes underlying PM, only few studies so far have explored motivational PM processes.…”

Social importance enhances prospective memory: evidence from an event-based task

“…For the reward condition, we expected that enhanced prospective memory performance would be accompanied by monitoring costs (e.g., Krishnan & Shapiro, 1999 but see Brandimonte & Ferrante, 2015;Cook, Rummel, & Dummel, 2015). Similarly, for the condition with both social importance and a reward, we also expected enhanced prospective memory performance and an ongoing task cost.…”

“…This suggests that adding prospective memory load increased monitoring costs (cf. Meier & Zimmermann, 2015), but importance did not necessarily do so (Cook, Rummel, & Dummel, 2015;Walter & Meier, 2015).…”