Location-based prospective memory

Abstract

This study explores location-based prospective memory. People often have to remember to do things when in a particular location, such as buying tissues the next time they are in the supermarket. For event cognition theory, location is important for structuring events. However, because event cognition has not been used to examine prospective memory, the question remains of how multiple events will influence prospective memory performance. In our experiments, people delivered messages from store to store in a virtual shopping mall as an ongoing task. The prospective tasks were to do certain activities in certain stores. For Experiment 1, each trial involved one prospective memory task to be done in a single location at one of three delays. The virtual environment and location cues were effective for prospective memory, and performance was unaffected by delay. For Experiment 2, each trial involved two prospective memory tasks, given in either one or two instruction locations, and to be done in either one or two store locations. There was improved performance when people received instructions from two locations and did both tasks in one location relative to other combinations. This demonstrates that location-based event structure influences how well people perform on prospective memory tasks.