Contamination effects in prospective memory: an exploratory study

• Autor(a) principal: Almeida, Rui Pedro Martins de
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10773/36198
• topic: Memory; Prospective memory; Adaptive memory; Contamination; Behavioural immune system

The behavioural immune system is an adaptive disease avoidance system. It involves three different types of responses: emotional, behavioural, and cognitive. This study investigated this last type of response, focusing on memory. Previous studies have shown that we tend to memorize easier stimuli related to aspects of contamination, which focused essentially on retrospective memory. In this study, we focused on another type of memory: prospective memory, which allows us to remember to perform actions that need to be performed in the future. Thus, we tried to understand if humans tend to have a higher prospective memory performance when prospective stimuli are processed as sources of contamination, as happens in retrospective memory. During the experiment, participants responded to an ongoing task, in which they were presented with a face and an object, and had to indicate the category of the object, by pressing one of three possible keys. In some of the trials, prospective stimuli were presented (one with and the other without disease cues), and participants had to press the space key in these cases, simulating the delivery of an envelope. Results showed no significant differences in performance and response time values in both tasks (ongoing and PM task) between contaminated and non-contamination conditions. However, they showed significant higher ongoing task hit rate and response time values than in the PM task. This study was the first one to explore the contamination effects in prospective memory. Despite this, we point some limitation that can inspire future studies.