Elsevier

Consciousness and Cognition

Volume 21, Issue 3, September 2012, Pages 1509-1516
Consciousness and Cognition

Short Communication
False prospective memory responses as indications of automatic processes in the initiation of delayed intentions

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2012.05.006Get rights and content

Abstract

To analyze the role of automatic processes in the fulfilment of delayed intentions, we extended a typical prospective memory setting with a context signal to indicate whether the intended action is to be carried out or not. Building on dual-process models of cognition, we hypothesized that automatic and controlled processes are in opposition when the action is to be suppressed, because automatic processes trigger the associated response whereas controlled processes exert inhibition. Experiment 1 demonstrates the occurrence of false prospective memory responses to cues with the “suppress” signal. Experiment 2 shows that the rate of false prospective memory responses is sensitive to a manipulation that strengthens the role of automatic processes in prospective memory. The findings support the use of false prospective memory responses for the study of automatic processes in the execution of delayed intentions.

Highlights

► Two experiments illustrate a new procedure for analysing automatic processes in prospective memory. ► Experiment 1 shows false prospective memory responses with the new procedure. ► Experiment 2 shows that the rate of false responses is sensitive to a manipulation of automatic processes. ► The findings demonstrate the role of automatic processes in the initiation of delayed intentions.

Introduction

Intentions are often postponed until the occurrence of some event in the future, like the intention to buy milk when one will pass the dairy shelf in the supermarket. In such prospective memory situations, it is decisive to detect the cueing event in the environment, and to retrieve and execute the intended action upon cue detection. Cue detection and action initiation can rely on controlled processes of monitoring and retrieval or on automatic processes that are spontaneously engaged, depending on the nature of the cue, the kind of intention, the demands of concurrent activities, and individual variables of the perceiver (Einstein and McDaniel, 2008, McDaniel and Einstein, 2000). The present research specifically aimed at the function of automatic processes at the stage of action initiation once a cue has been detected.

Research on prospective memory has extensively explored the involvement of controlled and spontaneous processes in the pursuit of delayed intentions. Evidence for the essential role of controlled processes came from studies which demonstrated impaired prospective memory performance due to cognitive load (Marsh & Hicks, 1998) or complex ongoing activities (Marsh, Hancock, & Hicks, 2002). Likewise, embedding a prospective memory task in an ongoing activity usually leads to prolonged reaction times in the latter (Cohen et al., 2008, Hicks et al., 2005, Smith, 2003), and such time costs in the ongoing task are usually correlated with successful prospective memory performance (McBride and Abney, 2012, Meiser and Schult, 2008, Smith, 2003). The mutual interference between prospective memory demands and other cognitive activities suggests that delayed intentions draw on limited attentional resources to engage controlled processes of retention and monitoring.

Notwithstanding the pivotal role of controlled processes under many circumstances, recent research has also identified conditions in which prospective memory tasks can be performed on the basis of spontaneous processes. For example, conditions of task-appropriate or focal processing, where the ongoing activity directs attention to those stimulus features that characterize prospective memory cues, enhance prospective memory (e.g., Meier & Graf, 2000) and reduce susceptibility to manipulations that otherwise affect performance, like relative task importance (Einstein et al., 2005, Kliegel et al., 2004), speed instructions (Meiser & Schult, 2008), and monitoring before cue occurrence (Scullin, McDaniel, & Einstein, 2010). In a similar vein, distinctiveness of the cueing events increases prospective memory performance and diminishes the deleterious effects of cognitive load (Guynn and McDaniel, 2007, McDaniel et al., 2004) as well as time costs in the ongoing task (Rummel, Boywitt, & Meiser, 2011). These results indicate that the dependency of prospective memory on attentional resources can largely be overcome under conditions of focal processing and cue distinctiveness.

The methods that have been used so far for analysing controlled and spontaneous processes in prospective memory primarily capture cognitive processes prior to the actual initiation of the intended action, whereas they do not afford a focused analysis of cognitive processes at the stage of action initiation. The analysis of controlled processes by time costs, for example, utilizes trials of the ongoing activity that do not contain prospective memory cues (e.g., Hicks et al., 2005), so that observed costs reflect monitoring for forthcoming cues and retention of the intention prior to the action. Likewise, deleterious effects of cognitive load on prospective memory performance may reflect interference with cue monitoring, intention retrieval, or any other processes involved in prospective memory performance, precluding a specific analysis of controlled versus automatic processes at the time of action initiation.

Moreover, most prevailing methods for analysing automatic processes provide only indirect evidence on the nature of spontaneous mechanisms in prospective memory. While empirical findings like the elimination of time costs (Einstein et al., 2005, Scullin et al., 2010) and robustness against cognitive load (Guynn and McDaniel, 2007, McDaniel et al., 2004) suggest the absence of resource demanding monitoring processes, they do not reveal the specific characteristics of automatic processes in prospective memory. An exception that bears more direct evidence on the function of spontaneous processes comes from the intention interference effect, which shows that ongoing activities are impaired by the presentation of intention-related stimuli even when the prospective memory task is suspended (Cohen et al., 2011, Einstein et al., 2005, Knight et al., 2011, Scullin et al., 2009). However, while this effect indicates spontaneous noticing processes of prospective memory cues even if the intended action does not follow, the effect does not shed light on the role of automatic processes in action initiation once a relevant cue has been detected.

Because the established methods for the analysis of automatic and controlled mechanisms focus on the processes of intention retention and cue detection prior to action initiation, the present research tested a new methodological approach to analysing the specific role of automatic processes at the stage of action initiation. The new approach uses false prospective memory responses as indications of automatic processes on the basis of recent dual-process theories of human cognition.

Dual-process theories of cognition distinguish between a system of fast, associative and effortless automatic processes and another system of deliberate, flexible and demanding controlled processes (see Evans (2008) for an overview). Whereas automatic processes lead to schematic and deterministic reactions upon activation, controlled processes can be adapted to situational constraints and bear the ability to inhibit responses (Strack & Deutsch, 2004). As a consequence, automatic processes trigger associated reactions even in situations where the reactions are inappropriate, and controlled processes have to exert inhibitory mechanisms to overcome undue schematic responses. Although dual-processing accounts have been criticized for their simplifying assumption of two distinct classes of cognitive processes (see Evans, 2008, for details), the models still provide a fruitful heuristic framework for analysing cognitive processes in various domains.

Applied to the initiation of delayed intentions, automatic and controlled processes usually lead to the same overt response when activated by a prospective memory cue. To disentangle the influences of automatic and controlled processes, we therefore employed an experimental procedure in which automatic and controlled processes should lead to different responses. Building on the rationale of the process dissociation procedure for recognition memory (Jacoby, 1991), we presented prospective memory cues (i.e., animal names) together with a discriminatory context attribute (i.e., colour of presentation) that signals whether the intended action (i.e., a specific keypress) has to be carried out or not. If the attribute signals that the action is to be carried out, both automatic and controlled processes lead to action initiation. If the attribute signals that the action is not to be carried out, in contrast, the prospective memory cue should still activate automatic processes that schematically trigger the corresponding keypress, whereas controlled processes inhibit action initiation. False alarms (i.e., performance of the intended action when the context attribute signals suppression) therefore indicate the specific function of automatic processes that were not overridden by controlled inhibitory processes.

The new experimental procedure aims at the assessment of automatic activation versus controlled inhibition via false alarms in the prospective memory task. More specifically, false prospective memory responses to cues with a ‘suppress’ signal should reflect the dominance of automatic over controlled processes at the stage of action initiation, that is, after the cue has been noticed. A demonstration of false prospective memory responses would thereby complement previous research on the intention interference effect by showing that automatic processes trigger not only spontaneous noticing of cues, but also spontaneous action initiation upon cue detection.

The present procedure resembles the earlier use of partial-match cues (Taylor et al., 2004, West and Craik, 1999), where prospective memory cues were defined as composites of two stimulus attributes (e.g., animal name starting with a certain letter) and partial-match cues were presented with only one of the critical attributes (e.g., animal name starting with a different letter). However, in the present approach one of the attributes was highlighted as the defining feature of prospective memory cues (i.e., animal name), whereas the second attribute formed a context attribute (i.e., colour) that signalled whether the intended action had to be performed or inhibited. The emphasis on one attribute should strengthen the automatic activation of the intended action when a cue with this particular attribute appears, so that a substantial rate of false alarms was expected with our procedure in contrast to the negligible rates of false alarms in the case of partial-match cues (i.e., about 1% or less for young adults; see Taylor et al., 2004, West and Craik, 1999).

We tested our approach in two experiments. The first experiment sought an initial demonstration of false alarms in prospective memory with the new experimental procedure. The second experiment included an imagery manipulation of action performance (Brewer et al., 2011, Brewer and Marsh, 2010) to test the sensitivity of the false alarm rate and to analyse potential side effects of automatisation in the pursuit of delayed intentions.

Section snippets

Experiment 1

The first experiment tested whether the new procedure is suitable to elicit false alarms in prospective memory and thus to analyse automatic activation in the initiation of delayed intentions. We extended a standard prospective memory setting in which participants had to press a designated key when an animal name appeared in an ongoing lexical decision task. To bring automatic and controlled processes in opposition, we added stimulus colour as a context attribute that signalled whether the

Experiment 2

Experiment 2 analysed false prospective memory responses under conditions of strengthened cue-action associations. For this purpose, we used an imagery task, in which participants imagine performing the intended action upon cue occurrence (Brewer and Marsh, 2010, Brewer et al., 2011), in combination with the generation of production rules. Production rules like ‘if cue x occurs, then I will perform action y’ have been shown to aid the pursuit of delayed intentions through enhanced cue

Conclusions

The present experiments used a new approach to analysing automatic processes in the initiation of delayed intentions. The approach follows the process-dissociation rationale (Jacoby, 1991) and takes false alarms as the primary unit of analysis, that is, prospective memory responses to cues which carry a context attribute indicating that the action must not be performed. Experiment 1 extended a typical prospective memory setting with stimulus colour as context attribute to signal whether the

Acknowledgment

This research was supported by a grant from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, Grant ME 1918/3-1).

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