Effects of Affective Valence and Cognitive Load on Prospective Memory

Abstract

newline Emotional factors have been found to have an important influence on memory. While several studies have investigated its influence on retrospective memory, very few studies have tried to understand the relationship between prospective memory and emotion, most of which relied on artificial tasks pre-decided by the experimenter leading to a poor correlation between prospective memory tasks inside and outside the laboratory. Thus the firstt study investigated the influence of emotion on prospective memory measured in a natural environment. Forty-eight young adults, both male and female, completed a daily activity planning sheet for one week. Their daily mood ratings and execution status of planned activity for each day were measured. Results indicated the significant effects of affective states on the planning and completion of the intended tasks. Positive mood states have been found to be better in planning of the tasks. However, prospective memory is found to be good under negative affective states. newlineThe second study was an attempt to investigate the effects of emotional valance of the stimulus and cognitive load on prospective memory. Prospective remembering or prospective memory is a relatively newer area of research in cognitive psychology. Defined as the ability to do previously planned actions in the future, prospective memory is the most frequent memory failures in everyday life (Kliegeland Mi. Martin, 2003). Several factors have been examined to explain failures in prospective memory performances out of which affect and cognitive load seems to be the most important but less explored factors. Though there are researches that have investigated the effect of cognitive factors on prospective memory, relatively little is known about the influence of emotional factors on prospective memory. Further, these studies exploring the relationship between affect and prospective memory are largely limited to negative affective states/valance. Also studies while addressing the affect and prospective memory relationship have ignored the cognitive factors (such as cognitive load) that might interfere into the said relationship. Thus, there exist a need to design experiments to address the cognitive components (such as cognitive load) involved in prospective memory and to systematically control/ vary them so as to demonstrate their effect the relationship between affect and prospective memory performances