McDaniel, M. A., & Einstein, G. O. (1993). The importance of cue familiarity and cue
distinctiveness in prospective memory. Memory, 1, 23-41.
The authors looked back at the retrospective memory literature to determine characteristics of the encoding that might help or hinder the association of the cue and target. They thought that the familiarity of the cue and/or the distinctiveness of the cue might affect the prospective memory performance of individuals.
In Experiment 1, participants completed a prospective memory task with either a familiar cue (BELT or POST) or an unfamiliar cue (MONAD or BOLE). Participants were told to complete a short term memory task, but if they saw their respective cue, they were to hit the F20 key. Between the instructions for this task and the completion of the task, participants completed the WAIS-R vocabulary test, rated a list of words for pleasantness, and two incidental retrospective memory tests: an implicit test (word-fragment completion) and an explicit test (recognition).
Results indicated that the unfamiliar cue produced more prospective responses, but the difference was not significant. Upon closer inspection, the authors realized that the word BOLE was a homophone of the word BOWL, and that the familiarity of the word BOWL might have had consequential effects on their results. In fact, it (or something about the word BOLE) did, because BOLE produced only 37% correct responses whereas MONAD produced 67%.
Recognition was not related to the prospective task, but the implicit task was related to the prospective task (as well as to the “write the day of the week on the paper” task).
In Experiment 2, participants completed a prospective memory task with either a familiar cue (FUSE or MOVIE) or an unfamiliar cue (SONE or YOLIF). In addition, the cues were embedded in a context that made them distinct or not. As a filler task, participants were given a free recall and a recognition task.
Results indicated that both familiarity and distinctiveness affected the prospective memory, with unfamiliar and distinctive cues producing better performance than familiar and nondistinctive. There was no additive effect of unfamiliarity and distinctness, though, possibly due to a ceiling effect.
There were no significant relationships between prospective memory and recall or recognition.
Prospective memory was significantly affected by characteristics of the target events. This study was the first to determine particular aspects that support successful prospective memory.