(www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/acp.1082 Associating a Time-Based Prospective Memory Task with an Expected Context Can Improve or Impair Intention Completion

Three experiments investigated time-based prospective memory defined here as remembering to fulfil an intention during a later window of time. When people associated the response window with a future context, time-based responding was better if that context expectation was correct as compared with having no context expectation at all. By contrast, if the response window occurred in a context that preceded the expected context, time-based performance was worse than having no context expectation at all. An explicit reminder about the intention was sufficient to ameliorate the decrement found with an incorrect context association. However, successfully completing a different, event-based prospective memory intention was not sufficient to overcome the incorrect context association. The authors assert that possessing such associations alters normal monitoring of the passage of time which in turn leads to the pattern of results obtained. Copyright # 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Human memory is studied in controlled laboratory settings, in part, because the principles that are acquired can be applied to improve everyday cognitive functioning. One area of memory that has the potential for direct and immediate application is understanding how people successfully remember to complete their intentions; and that is the focus of thi