The emotionally enhanced memory effect is robust across studies of retrospective memory, with heightened recall for items with emotional content (e.g., words like "murder") relative to neutral items (e.g., words like "envelope"). Only a handful of studies have examined the influence of emotion on prospective memory (PM), with mixed results. In some cases emotion enhances PM, and in others it im...

Prospective memory (PM) describes the ability to execute a previously planned action at the appropriate point in time. Although behavioral studies clearly showed that prospective memory performance is affected by the emotional significance attributed to the intended action, no study so far investigated the brain mechanisms subserving the modulatory effect of emotional salience on PM performance...

The present study investigated the effect of Parkinson's disease (PD) on prospective memory (PM) tasks by varying the emotional content of the PM actions. Twenty-one older adults with PD and 25 healthy older adults took part in the present study. Participants performed three virtual days in the Virtual Week task. On each virtual day, participants performed actions with positive, negative or neu...

We investigated whether focal/nonfocal effects (e.g., Einstein et al., 2005) in prospective memory (PM) are explained by cue differences in monitoring difficulty. In Experiment 1, we show that syllable cues (used in Einstein et al., 2005) are more difficult to monitor for than are word cues; however, initial-letter cues (in words) are similar in monitoring difficulty to word cues (Experiments 2...

Prospective memory (PM), or memory for realizing delayed intentions, was examined with an event-based paradigm while simultaneously measuring neural activity with high-density EEG recordings. Specifically, the neural substrates of monitoring for an event-based cue were examined, as well as those perhaps associated with the cognitive processes supporting detection of cues and fulfillment of inte...

Prospective memory (PM) refers to our ability to realize delayed intentions. In event-based PM paradigms, participants must act on an intention when they detect the occurrence of a pre-established cue. Some theorists propose that in such paradigms PM responding can only occur when participants deliberately initiate processes for monitoring their environment for appropriate cues. Others propose ...

In prospective memory tasks different kinds of load can occur. Adding a prospective memory task can impose a load on ongoing task performance. Adding ongoing task load (OTL) can affect prospective memory performance. The existence of multiple target events increases prospective load (PL) and adding complexity to the to-be-remembered action increases retrospective load (RL). In two experiments, ...

Individuals with substance use disorders (SUDs) commonly report lapses in prospective memory (PM) in their daily lives; however, our understanding of the profile and predictors of laboratory-based PM deficits in SUDs and their associations with everyday PM failures is still very preliminary. The current study examined these important questions using well-validated measures of self-report and la...

A current issue in the field of prospective memory (i.e., memory for intentions) is the extent to which intentions interfere with ongoing activities. A question of interest is whether this interference is specific to stimuli that are relevant to the intention or whether interference is more general in its influence. Participants performed a lexical decision task (LDT) with an embedded prospecti...

Some studies have found that prospective memory (PM) cues which are emotionally valenced influence age effects in prospective remembering, but it remains unclear whether this effect reflects the operation of processes implemented at encoding or retrieval. In addition, none of the prior ageing studies of valence on PM function have examined potential costs of engaging in different valence condit...