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Category: Project

Description: Prospective memory (PM) describes the ability to remember to perform goal-relevant actions at an appropriate time in the future despite concurrent demands. A key contributor to PM performance is thought to be the effortful monitoring of the environment for PM-related cues, a process whose existence is typically inferred from a behavioral interference measure of reaction times. This measure, referred to as “PM costs”, is an informative but indirect proxy for monitoring, and complementary methods are needed to understand the nature and consequences of monitoring behaviors. In this study, we asked participants to perform a visual search task with arrows that varied in difficulty while concurrently performing a delayed-recognition PM task with pictures of faces and scenes. To gain a precise measurement of monitoring behavior, we used eye-tracking to record fixations to all task-relevant stimuli from moment to moment and related these fixation patterns to PM costs. We found that PM costs reflected two dissociable monitoring strategies: higher costs were associated with an early and frequent monitoring strategy while lower costs were associated with infrequent and late monitoring. Moreover, the link between monitoring behaviors and PM costs varied with cognitive load. Tracking fixation patterns provided greater explanatory power for PM accuracy than using PM costs alone. This study demonstrates the benefit of eye-tracking to disentangle the nature of PM costs and more precisely describe monitoring processes involved in prospective remembering.