The Effect of Implementation Intentions on Prospective Memory Commission Errors under Different Cognitive Loads

Prospective memory (PM) refers to the ability to remember to perform a planned event or activity at a specific time or situation in the future. Implementation intentions can promote a connection between PM cues and intended actions, thus improving an individual’s PM performance. However, this simple and effective encoding strategy may also have negative effects. For example, an implementation intention may result in PM commission errors that occur when an individual makes a false PM response to repeated PM cues that are no longer relevant as the PM task has been completed. Existing studies have explored the effect of implementation intentions on PM commission errors under low cognitive load. However, the role of implementation intentions in promoting linkages between PM cues and actions tends to disintegrate under high cognitive loads. Therefore, this study aimed to explore the effect of implementation intentions on PM commission errors under different cognitive load conditions. In this study, 58 college students participated in a mixed experimental design of 2 (encoding methods: implementation intention, standard) × 2 (cognitive load conditions: low, high). The results showed that implementation intentions promoted PM commission errors under the low-cognitive-load condition only, and there was no difference in the performance of ongoing tasks between the implementation intention encoding and the standard encoding conditions. However, individuals in the implementation intention condition reacted more slowly when encountering previous PM cues. The results suggest that the effect of implementation intentions on PM commission errors relies upon automated processing as a whole. However, individuals in the implementation intention condition required more attentional resources to suppress the no-longer-relevant intended actions when previous PM cues appeared, supporting the dual-mechanism theory.