Racing to remember: A theory of decision control in event-based prospective memory.

Strickland, Luke; Loft, Shayne; Remington, Roger W.; Heathcote, Andrew · 2018 · Psychological Review

DOI: 10.1037/rev0000113

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Summary

This paper addresses the cognitive mechanisms underlying event-based prospective memory (PM), the ability to remember to perform planned actions in the future. While traditional theories like the Preparatory Attentional and Memory Processes (PAM) theory suggest that PM costs arise from shared cognitive capacity between the ongoing task (OT) and PM monitoring, recent evidence accumulation modeling has challenged this view. The authors introduce the Prospective Memory Decision Control (PMDC) model, a computational framework based on the Linear Ballistic Accumulator (LBA), to provide a comprehensive account of both OT performance and PM accuracy. This approach moves beyond analyzing only OT response times to explain the full range of behavioral data, including response time distributions and accuracy rates. The authors evaluated the PMDC model using data from two experiments involving lexical decision tasks with added PM requirements. The first experiment manipulated PM focality (focal vs. non-focal targets), while the second manipulated the perceived importance of the PM task. The PMDC model posits a race to threshold between accumulators for OT responses and the PM response. It incorporates proactive control, defined as strategic adjustments to decision thresholds, and reactive control, defined as stimulus-driven changes in accumulation rates, including excitation of the PM accumulator and inhibition of OT accumulators. The results demonstrated that the PMDC model accurately fit the observed data, accounting for PM costs and accuracy variations. Crucially, the model confirmed that PM costs are not caused by decreased capacity for the OT, as accumulation rates for non-PM trials did not differ between PM and control conditions. Instead, PM cost was driven by increased OT thresholds (proactive control) to delay OT decisions, allowing time for PM processes. For PM accuracy, the model identified reactive inhibition of OT accumulators on PM trials as the strongest correlate. Additionally, lowering PM thresholds (proactive control) significantly improved accuracy, particularly when PM importance was emphasized. Reactive excitation of the PM accumulator was also stronger for focal targets, explaining higher accuracy in those conditions. The significance of this work lies in its refinement of PM theory, shifting the explanation of PM cost from capacity sharing to strategic decision control. The PMDC model reveals that successful PM relies on a combination of proactive threshold adjustments and reactive inhibition of competing processes. The authors suggest that future applications of PMDC should explore individual differences, neural substrates, and high-load environments like air traffic control, where capacity sharing may indeed occur. This framework provides a robust tool for dissecting the latent psychological processes that govern prospective memory performance.

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• prospective memory interruptions