Cue competition in prospective memory

Prospective memory refers to remembering to perform a previously planned ac tivity. Two experiments were conducted to see if effects of cue competition similar to blocking and overshadowing occur in prospective memory. Partici pants were led to believe that the experiments were about the relationship between memory and creativity. To test prospective memory, participants wer e instructed to mark cue words that would appear later in a task requiring the generation of sentences. In Exp. 1 (N=119) one group was told to place an "x" over the cue word "rake"; a second was told to mark two words of equ al salience ("method" and "rake"); and a third group was told to mark two c ue words of unequal salience (the highly salient word "monad" and "rake"). "Rake" was the only cue word that actually appeared in the task involving g eneration of sentences. Participants instructed to place an "x" over one cu e marked the target cue "rake" more frequently than if told to mark two cue s tan overshadowing-like effect). The frequency of marking "rake" was lowes t on the first test trial if participants had been instructed to mark both "rake" and "monad." In Exp. 2 (N=43) a blocking group was trained to mark o ne cue word ("rake") and a control group received no training. Two days lat er, all participants were instructed to mark two cues ("rake" and "method") during a task involving the generation of sentences. Prior training interf ered with performance to a new cue ("method") given in combination with the pretrained cue ("rake," a blocking-like effect). These experiments demonst rate the existence of cue competition in prospective memory and suggest the possibility of applying theories of elementary associative learning to the study of prospective memory.