Competing cues and prospective memory

Richards and Krauter (1999) conducted an experiment involving cue competition and prospective memory. The prospective memory task involved sentence generation, and the results suggested that higher salient cues overshadow lower salient cues causing a decrease in prospective memory. I conducted an extension of their experiment. The design was a one-way, multi-level, between-groups design. The three groups were one cue word, two cue words of equal salience, and two cue words of unequal salience. Participants were given instructions to mark the word(s) every time that they appeared in an article (prospective memory test). All groups read the same article and performed the same distraction exercise before they took the prospective memory test. An ANOVA was used. to analyze the data. Alpha was set at .05. The two cue words of equal salience condition was not significantly different from the one cue word condition. Participants in the condition with two cue words of unequal salience performed worse on the prospective memory test, than did the participants in the other two conditions, supporting two of my hypotheses. The results provided inductive support for the hypothesis and results found by Richards and Krauter (1999)