On the interaction of ongoing cognitive activity and the nature of an event-based intention

Three experiments were conducted to explore the interaction between the nat ure of an event-based prospective intention and the ongoing activity in whi ch it was embedded. Following the basic predictions of E. A. Maylor's ( 199 6, 1998) task appropriate processing framework, we orthogonally crossed sem antic and structural ongoing activities with intentions to respond to seman tic and structural event-based cues. In Experiments 1 and 2, we found a cro ss-over interaction in which the match of the ongoing task and the nature o f the intention resulted in better event-based performance than a mismatch between the two. Experiment 3 attempted to define boundary conditions for t hese effects by demonstrating that the task appropriate processing effect w ill not occur when event-based cues are particularly salient. The implicati ons of the results and suggestions for further investigations are discussed . Copyright (C) 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.