Prospective remembering: perceptually driven or conceptually driven processes?

Converging experimental operations and several prospective memory tasks were used across three experiments to determine the extent to which prospective remembering is supported by data-driven versus conceptually driven processes. In all experiments, subjects were asked to perform an action when a target item later occurred. When the semantic context changed from encoding to test, prospective memory significantly declined (Experiment 1). When the target event (the item, which in its subsequent appearance in the experiment was the signal to perform the action) was presented as word (relative to picture presentation, Experiment 2) or was encoded nonsemantically (relative to semantic encoding, Experiment 3), there was a decline in prospective memory performance. Dividing attention during prospective memory retrieval substantially reduced prospective memory performance (Experiment 3). The results of this research indicated that prospective memory is largely conceptually driven, and it behaves more similarly to direct rather than indirect conceptual tests. We suggest that prospective remembering of the type studied here is mediated by a reflexive episodic associative memory system as proposed by Moscovitch (1994).