Activation of Completed, Uncompleted, and Partially Completed Intentions

The intention-superiority effect is the finding that response latencies are faster for items related to an uncompleted intention as compared with materials that have no associated intentionality. T. Goschke and J. Kuhl (1993) used recognition latency for simple action scripts to document this effect. We used a lexical-decision task to replicate that shorter latencies were associated with uncompleted intentions as compared with neutral materials (Experiments 1 and 3). Experiments 2-4, however, demonstrated that latencies were longer for completed scripts as compared with neutral materials. In Experiment 4, shorter latencies were also obtained for partially completed scripts. The results are discussed in terms of the activation and inhibition that may guide behavior, as well as how these results may inform theories of prospective memory.