PROSPECTIVE REMEMBERING - PERCEPTUALLY DRIVEN OR CONCEPTUALLY DRIVEN PROCESSES

Converging experimental operations and several prospective memory task s were used across three experiments to determine the extent to which prospective remembering is supported by data-driven versus conceptuall y driven processes. In all experiments, subjects were asked to perform an action when a target item later occurred. When the semantic contex t changed from encoding to test, prospective memory significantly decl ined (Experiment 1). When the target event (the item, which in its sub sequent appearance in the experiment was the signal to perform the act ion) was presented as a word (relative to picture presentation, Experi ment 2) or was encoded nonsemantically (relative to semantic encoding, Experiment 3), there was a decline in prospective memory performance. Dividing attention during prospective memory retrieval substantially reduced prospective memory performance (Experiment 3). The results of this research indicated that prospective memory is largely conceptuall y driven, and it behaves more similarly to direct rather than indirect conceptual tests. We suggest that prospective remembering of the type studied here is mediated by a reflexive episodic associative memory s ystem as proposed by Moscovitch (1994).