Project Director

Shelton, Jill T.

Department Examiner

Foerder, Preston

Department

Dept. of Psychology

Publisher

University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

Place of Publication

Chattanooga (Tenn.)

Abstract

Prospective memory is the ability to remember and act upon future intentions. In the context of daily life, prospective memory intentions can be either self-interested or pro-socially motivated (such as remembering to pay a credit card bill or buy a gift for a friend, respectively). Research suggests that individuals place greater importance on their performance of prosocial intentions rather than self-interested intentions, and a pro-social advantage has been observed in prospective memory. I investigated the role of motivation in prospective memory and a person’s belief about their cognitive abilities (i.e., metacognition) in regard to prospective memory. The present study used an eye-tracking paradigm in which participants were engaged in an ongoing visual search task, with a prospective memory task embedded into the trail. Participants’ motivational state was manipulated through a monetary incentive, and they also made predictions and postdictions about their performance on the prospective memory and ongoing tasks as a proxy for metacognition. I found a trend for a prosocial advantage to prospective memory performance and metacognitive awareness, and a tendency of neutral motivational states in reducing cognitive effort in prospective memory target monitoring. Such trends were not observed in the self-interested motivational state.

IRB Number

17-103

Degree

B. A.; An honors thesis submitted to the faculty of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Bachelor of Arts.

Date

5-2018

Subject

Prospective memory; Self-interest

Keyword

Prospective memory; Motivational states; Memory; Cognition; Prosocial; Self-interested

Discipline

Psychology

Document Type

Theses

Extent

25 leaves

DCMI Type

Text

Language

English

Rights

http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

License

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/

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Psychology Commons

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