Prospective memory enables us to pursue intentions and remember to perform intended actions in the future. While previous research has established that pursuing intentions can incur costs in ongoing task performance and completing intentions can incur aftereffects due to continued intention retrieval, the underlying processes of these effects are a subject of debate.
Here, we used mouse-movement tracking to (A) Investigate the involvement of reflexive-associative and discrepancy-plus-search processes in the retrieval of completed intentions. (B) Test whether ongoing-task costs during intention pursuit are associated with strategic monitoring processes or with a strategic delay of ongoing-task responses. (C) Probe the potential interaction of processes underlying ongoing-task costs and processes and retrieval of completed intentions.
First, our analyses of mouse-movement data suggest that aftereffects of completed intentions can best be explained by a reflexive initiation of the completed intention, which is followed by a subsequent movement correction that we interpret as a time-consuming response-verification process. Regarding ongoing-task costs, we found that actively pursuing an intention most likely leads to a strategic delay of ongoing-task responses. Lastly, we found evidence for an interaction of these processes: Pursuing a novel intention after intention completion exacerbated orienting responses to deviant stimuli, increased the readiness to reflexively initiate the completed intention and substantially prolonged response-verification processes following reflexive intention retrieval. Our findings provide novel insights into the processes underlying intention retrieval and show that mouse-movement tracking can be a valuable tool to assess process dynamics in prospective memory.