Abstract

Existing research shows that individuals monitor for prospective memory (PM) targets strategically by heightening monitoring in relevant contexts where PM targets are likely to occur, and relaxing monitoring in irrelevant contexts where PM targets are unlikely to occur. To date, the study of strategic monitoring has been done in paradigms in which participants receive explicit contextual information to help guide their monitoring. Extending this work, the present study aimed to investigate whether individuals can strategically monitor based on a learned contextual cue, a process termed learning-based strategic monitoring. Using cost to ongoing, lexical decision task (LDT) performance as a metric of PM monitoring, Experiments 1 and 2 showed that participants monitored more in relevant (i.e., words) than in irrelevant (i.e., nonwords) PM contexts, consistent with learning-based strategic monitoring. A finer analysis of these results, however, revealed that this pattern was driven, at least in part, by a general bias to monitor for PM targets more in words than nonwords. In fact, when nonwords served as the relevant context (Experiment 3), participants no longer exhibited a pattern consistent with learning-based strategic monitoring. To test whether this word-monitoring bias had a similar influence on strategic monitoring using explicit contextual information, a final experiment was conducted in which participants were explicitly told that PM targets would only occur in nonwords. Experiment 4 revealed that participants used the explicit contextual information to strategically monitor during the first PM block. However, evidence of strategic monitoring diminished in later blocks, indicating that participants’ ability to strategically monitor may have been overcome by their bias to monitor in words. Together, this study identifies an important feature of learning- and explicit-based strategic monitoring within an LDT, namely, a word- monitoring bias. Understanding this bias is critical, as it can masquerade as strategic monitoring when the bias guides attention towards the PM relevant context (i.e., when words serve as the relevant context). Importantly, this bias may instead impede one’s ability to strategically monitor using a predictive contextual cue when the bias guides attention away from the PM relevant context (i.e., when nonwords serve as the relevant context).

Committee Chair

Julie M. Bugg

Committee Members

Mark A. McDaniel Jeffrey M. Zacks

Degree

Master of Arts (AM/MA)

Author's Department

Psychology

Author's School

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Document Type

Thesis

Date of Award

Fall 12-2025

Language

English (en)

Author's ORCID

https://orcid.org/0009-0005-8356-5326

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