Slow down and remember to remember! A delay theory of prospective memory costs.
DOI: 10.1037/a0038952
archive: archived pipeline: cataloged verified
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Summary
This paper challenges the dominant theoretical framework regarding prospective memory (PM) costs, specifically the assumption that PM demands consume limited-capacity resources shared with ongoing tasks. Event-based PM requires individuals to perform a deferred action when a specific target is encountered while engaged in a concurrent ongoing task. Existing theories, such as the Preparatory Attentional and Memory (PAM) processes theory and the Multiprocess View, interpret the observed slowing of ongoing task reaction times (RTs) as evidence of resource sharing or attentional monitoring. Previous support for this view came from diffusion model analyses suggesting that PM demands reduced the rate of evidence accumulation for ongoing task decisions. The authors argue that this interpretation is flawed and propose a "delay theory" account, which posits that individuals intentionally slow their responses to allow more time for PM retrieval, rather than suffering from reduced processing efficiency. To test these competing accounts, the authors reanalyzed data from previous studies (Boywitt & Rummel, 2012; Horn et al., 2011) and introduced two new data sets better suited for model fitting. They applied both the Ratcliff diffusion model and the Linear Ballistic Accumulator (LBA) model to the data. These models decompose RT distributions into parameters representing the rate of evidence accumulation (processing speed) and the response threshold (caution level). The analysis aimed to determine whether PM costs were driven by a reduction in accumulation rates (supporting capacity-sharing theories) or an increase in response thresholds (supporting the delay theory). Additionally, the authors analyzed data from Lourenço, White, and Maylor (2013) to examine stimulus-specific adjustments in response bias. The results provided little support for capacity-sharing theories. Across the data sets, PM demands had minimal effect on the rate of evidence accumulation for ongoing task choices. Instead, PM demands consistently increased the response thresholds, indicating that participants adopted a more cautious response policy by requiring more evidence before responding. This finding held true for both the diffusion and LBA models. Furthermore, analysis of the Lourenço et al. data revealed that participants differentially adjusted their thresholds, slowing responses specifically for stimuli that might contain PM targets while maintaining faster responses for non-target stimuli. This suggests a strategic mechanism to improve PM detection without uniformly slowing all responses. These findings support a delay theory of PM costs, concluding that the slowing of ongoing task RTs is a strategic adjustment to increase processing time for PM retrieval, rather than a byproduct of resource competition. The authors argue that this necessitates a fundamental reevaluation of current PM theories, which have long assumed that PM failures stem from capacity deficits. By reframing PM costs as a deliberate trade-off between speed and caution, the study offers a new mechanistic understanding of how individuals manage dual-task demands, with implications for designing interventions to improve PM performance in clinical and safety-critical contexts.
Key finding
Prospective memory costs are primarily caused by an increase in response thresholds for the ongoing task rather than a reduction in evidence accumulation rates, supporting a delay theory over capacity-sharing accounts.
Methodology
modeling
Provenance
The full processing record for this entry. Every stage of this paper's journey through the pipeline is logged — what ran, with which tool and model, how many attempts it took, and when it last completed. Discovered via author_sweep_intake on 2026-05-28.
| Stage | Outcome | Tool | Model | Prompt | Attempts | Completed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| discover | success | author_sweep | — | — | 2 | 2026-05-28 |
| archive | success | canonical_url | — | — | 5 | 2026-06-06 |
| extract | success | cached | — | — | 3 | 2026-06-10 |
| clean | success | clean | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-04 |
| chunk | success | chunk | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-04 |
| embed | success | embed | Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-8B | — | 1 | 2026-06-04 |
| enrich | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-05-28 |
| promote | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-04 |
| summarize | success | llm | qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant | summ-v5 | 2 | 2026-06-10 |
| tag | success | vector_similarity | — | — | 15 | 2026-06-11 |
| verify | success | — | — | — | 2 | 2026-06-10 |
Summary generated by qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant on 2026-06-10; verification: verified.
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