Event-based prospective remembering in task switching conditions: Exploring the effects of immediate and postponed responses in cue detection

Objective: This study aims to compare the influence of immediate and postponed responses in the detection of prospective memory (PM) target cues and consequent PM retrieval, while also varying the ongoing task demands. This comparison can have important implications in the design of PM tasks, especially because there has been an interchangeable use of both responses without taking into consideration that they might require different mechanisms.MethodA total of 32 participants performed a task switching paradigm with an embedded PM task, following a within-subjects 3 (type of response: no PM response, immediate, postponed)x3 (switching load: pure, repetition, alternation) design.ResultsThe results yielded no relevant effects of type of response, immediate, or postponed, neither in the PM accuracy nor in the ongoing task performance. However, a significant PM interference effect was found with slower response times in the ongoing activity with PM requirements in comparison with the same task with no PM instructions.ConclusionsOverall, given the experimental parameters used, this study supports no behavioral differences between immediate and postponed responses even when the ongoing task is also characterised by different levels of demand.
This work was funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia - FCT) under a Doctoral grant (PD/BD/105964/2014) of the FCT PhD Programmes with the support of the Programa Operacional Potencial Humano (POPH). It was partially conducted at Psychology Research Centre (UID/PSI/01662/2013), University of Minho, supported by the FCT and the Portuguese Ministry of Education and Science through national funds and co-financed by FEDER through COMPETE2020 under the Portugal 2020 Partnership Agreement (POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007653). The authors would like to acknowledge all the participants who collaborated in this work, and the reviewers whose comments helped to improve the quality of the manuscript.