Moving forward: Exploring the role of interference on prospective memory deactivation

Abstract

Recent prospective memory (PM) studies have shown that an intention may be erroneously executed despite no-longer-needed (i.e., commission errors), especially under demanding ongoing activities. In the current study, we examined whether PM deactivation benefits from a retroactive interference mechanism. For this, we set up a procedure in which participants are first asked to perform a PM task which is critically declared finished afterwards. Next, they encoded a new and dissimilar PM intention to accomplish later (Experiment 1) or performed filler tasks with increased working memory difficulty levels (Experiment 2). Lastly, all participants encountered several (but irrelevant) PM cues. Together, our findings provide evidence that the efficiency of the deactivation process can be modulated by encoding novel and dissimilar PM tasks and by the type of processing after intention completion. These findings are discussed in terms of strategic or spontaneous retrieval processes and linked to a retroactive interference mechanism which helps to overwrite or deteriorate the old-PM task representation.