Prospective Memory as A Function of Reward Responsiveness and Ongoing Task Difficulty

Prospective Memory is the capability to remember to perform planned actions in the future. The experiment aimed to investigate the event-based Prospective Memory task performance of young adults as function of reward-responsiveness and difficulty in ongoing task. For the present experiment total 120 young adults-76 females and 44 males had been taken on the basis of inclusion and exclusion criteria. Convenience sampling method was used. BIS/BAS scale was administered to find out group of participants with (low, medium and high) reward- responsiveness and they were exposed to two experimental conditions (Prospective memory task embedded in simple and complex ongoing task) to investigate their prospective memory task performance. In Prospective memory task embedded in simple ongoing task total 60 words were presented to them, where each slide contained only one word at the middle. Among those, 18 words were presented as Prospective Memory target word. The target words were any country name with red colour. And the other 42 words were any type of word with any colour. Target and nontarget words were presented randomly. Participants’ task was to say ‘present’ to the target words and find out ‘parts of speech’ from the rest of the words. In Prospective memory task embedded in complex ongoing task same number of words were presented but additionally there were one-digit numbers, each of which was presented beside each word. Here the participants’ task was to say ‘present’ to the Indian city name written with black colour as this was the Prospective memory target word. Participant’s task was to find out ‘parts of speech’ from the rest of words as well as sum up all the one-digit numbers from beginning to end of stimulus presentation. To investigate the event-based prospective memory signal detection paradigm was used as this method enables to understand the accuracy as well as inaccuracy of performance in terms of both right and wrong response. Right response consists of Hit and correct rejection and wrong response or error can be defined as error of omission (miss) and error of commission (false alarm). The result revealed that there is significant mean difference on the Prospective memory task performance between participants of low and high reward responsiveness group in terms of hit responses and true proportion of correct detection. There is significant mean difference on the Prospective memory task performance between participants of (low-high), (low-medium) and (medium-high) reward responsiveness group in terms of false alarm responses. There is significant effect of ongoing task difficulty on Prospective Memory task performance among the participants of (low, medium & high) reward responsiveness group. No significant interaction effect of reward responsiveness and ongoing task difficulty has been found on Prospective Memory task performance.