A fresh pair of eyes on prospective memory monitoring

Remembering to complete one’s future intentions is termed prospective memory. We employed a new eyetracking paradigm to concretely observe the impact of environmental cues on strategic monitoring within a visual prospective memory task. Participants worked on a continuous living-count task comprising images, while simultaneously being asked to respond to a prospective memory target when it appeared. Importantly, the prospective memory target appeared in a different area of the participant’s visual field than did the continuous task, which is consistent with prospective memory in many real-world situations, and further allows for a clear index of strategic monitoring processes. Subtle cues in the form of semantically related images were embedded in the continuous task to prompt monitoring for the prospective memory target. Overt strategic monitoring was operationalized as the number of times participants fixated on the designated target area, and cue-driven monitoring was defined by the number of fixations on the prospective memory target region directly after fixating on a related cue. Overt strategic monitoring for the prospective memory target was directly observed for participants in the prospective memory condition, and cue-driven monitoring was also observed in these participants, since they were more likely to initiate monitoring immediately after fixating on a semantically related cue, relative to an unrelated cue. This psychophysiological approach afforded precise measurement of the strategic monitoring process and revealed how contextual cues in the environment interact with the cognitive mechanisms supporting prospective memory.