Roy D'Andrade

Event-based prospective memory involves remembering to perform an action in response to a particular future event (e.g., give your colleague a message when you see her). In the typical laboratory paradigm to investigate event-based prospective memory, participants perform a particular action (e.g., press the Z key) when a target word appears on a computer screen during an ongoing task (e.g., a lexical decision task). We distinguish between the prospective component of the task (remembering that you have to do something) and the retrospective component (remembering when to perform the action). A current debate in the prospectivememory literature regards the question whether the processes involved in the prospective component of the task are automatic or resource-demanding. To address this issue, we have developed a multinomial processing tree model (Smith & Bayen, 2004) which is the first formal model of event-based prospective memory. The model includes a parameter P that measures the degree to which the prospective component of the prospective-memory task is resource-demanding, a parameter M for the retrospective-memory component of the task, and two parameters related to the ongoing task.