Negative prospective memory: Remembering not to perform an action

Pink, Jeffrey E.; Dodson, Chad S. · 2012 · OpenAlex-citations

DOI: 10.3758/s13423-012-0337-4

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Summary

This study investigates "negative prospective memory," defined as the ability to remember *not* to perform an action when encountering a specific cue, such as stopping medication use when it is no longer needed. The research addresses a contradiction in existing literature regarding whether completed intentions are deactivated (and thus unlikely to cause errors) or remain active and prone to commission errors. Specifically, the authors examine whether attentional resources are required to inhibit habitual prospective responses that are no longer necessary. The researchers conducted two experiments (1A and 1B) involving 192 undergraduate participants in a 2 (habit vs. no-habit) × 2 (full vs. divided attention) between-subjects design. The procedure consisted of three phases. In the habit/no-habit phase, participants performed a lexical decision task with embedded prospective memory cues. In the "habit" condition, participants responded to eight specific cue words ten times, establishing a routine response. In the "no-habit" condition, they responded to these cues only once. In the subsequent test phase, participants performed a similar task with a new set of cues. Crucially, the four cue words from the previous phase were presented again but required no response. Participants in the divided-attention condition simultaneously performed a digit-monitoring task to tax cognitive resources, while those in the full-attention condition did not. The results demonstrated that commission errors—mistakenly performing the prospective response to irrelevant cues—were significantly higher in the habit condition when attention was divided. Focused contrasts confirmed that dividing attention increased errors only for cues previously associated with a habitual response, not for those in the no-habit condition. Control items, which were matched for familiarity but lacked an associated intention, produced negligible error rates, ruling out familiarity as the cause. Additionally, prospective memory accuracy for valid cues was lower under divided attention and for novel cues compared to repeat cues. The findings indicate that inhibitory failures are a primary cause of prospective memory commission errors. While non-habitual intentions appear to deactivate upon completion, habitual intentions remain in an active state even after they are finished. Consequently, individuals require available attentional resources to suppress these prepotent responses. When cognitive load is high, the inability to inhibit the habitual response leads to errors. This suggests a broader definition of prospective memory that includes the active withholding of actions and highlights the critical role of executive control in preventing errors related to completed but previously routine intentions.

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• prospective memory interruptions