Publicação
A race to remember: the effect of prospective memory task difficulty in incidental learning
| Resumo: | Prospective memory, the ability to remember the intention of performing an action in the future without a permanent reminder, has been studied over the years and is a part of everyday life. But what is its effect on incidental learning? The present study aimed to answer this question. The difficulty of the prospective memory task was manipulated, and besides a control group that only performed a lexical decision task, it included two experimental groups that additionally performed a prospective memory task with nonfocal cues: one performed an easy prospective memory task and the other a difficult one, in a total of 159 participants. Then, a recognition task of the words presented in the lexical decision task was performed. The performance of an easy prospective memory task did not impact either the lexical decision task nor the recognition task performances, but an increase of its difficulty led to a worst performance in the lexical decision task, with no impact on the recognition task performance. These results support previous studies and present themselves as one more argument of support to the delay theory, a theory that explains the mechanisms through which prospective actions are retrieved to be performed. |
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| Autores principais: | Mello, Beatriz Silva |
| Assunto: | Delay theory Incidental learning Nonfocal cues Prospective memory Prospective memory task difficulty Aprendizagem incidental Dificuldade da tarefa de memória prospetiva Memória prospetiva Pistas não focais |
| Ano: | 2021 |
| País: | Portugal |
| Tipo de documento: | dissertação de mestrado |
| Tipo de acesso: | acesso aberto |
| Instituição associada: | Universidade do Minho |
| Idioma: | inglês |
| Origem: | RepositóriUM - Universidade do Minho |
| Resumo: | Prospective memory, the ability to remember the intention of performing an action in the future without a permanent reminder, has been studied over the years and is a part of everyday life. But what is its effect on incidental learning? The present study aimed to answer this question. The difficulty of the prospective memory task was manipulated, and besides a control group that only performed a lexical decision task, it included two experimental groups that additionally performed a prospective memory task with nonfocal cues: one performed an easy prospective memory task and the other a difficult one, in a total of 159 participants. Then, a recognition task of the words presented in the lexical decision task was performed. The performance of an easy prospective memory task did not impact either the lexical decision task nor the recognition task performances, but an increase of its difficulty led to a worst performance in the lexical decision task, with no impact on the recognition task performance. These results support previous studies and present themselves as one more argument of support to the delay theory, a theory that explains the mechanisms through which prospective actions are retrieved to be performed. |
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