The Effect of Task Duration on Event-Based Prospective Memory: A Multinomial Modeling Approach

Hongxia Zhang, Weihai Tang, Xiping Liu

Remembering to perform an action when a specific event occurs is referred to as Event-Based Prospective Memory (EBPM). This study investigated how EBPM performance is affected by task duration by having university students (n = 223) perform an EBPM task that was embedded within an ongoing computer-based color-matching task. For this experiment, we separated the overall task's duration into the filler task duration and the ongoing task duration. The filler task duration is the length of time between the intention and the beginning of the ongoing task, and the ongoing task duration is the length of time between the beginning of the ongoing task and the appearance of the first Prospective Memory (PM) cue. The filler task duration and ongoing task duration were further divided into three levels: 3, 6, and 9 min. Two factors were then orthogonally manipulated between-subjects using a multinomial processing tree model to separate the effects of different task durations on the two EBPM components. A mediation model was then created to verify whether task duration influences EBPM via self-reminding or discrimination. The results reveal three points. (1) Lengthening the duration of ongoing tasks had a negative effect on EBPM performance while lengthening the duration of the filler task had no significant effect on it. (2) As the filler task was lengthened, both the prospective and retrospective components show a decreasing and then increasing trend. Also, when the ongoing task duration was lengthened, the prospective component decreased while the retrospective component significantly increased. (3) The mediating effect of discrimination between the task duration and EBPM performance was significant. We concluded that different task durations influence EBPM performance through different components with discrimination being the mediator between task duration and EBPM performance.