In our day-to-day lives, our spontaneous thoughts often center around significant concerns or goals we have yet to accomplish. Research utilizing time-based prospective memory tasks suggests that these thoughts can act as cues to perform specific actions at designated times such as calling the experimenter at a later time. However, many of our everyday intentions involve tasks needing completion before a deadline rather than at an exact moment, such as submitting a conference abstract.
We hypothesized that in such cases, intention-related thoughts might not only increase the overall likelihood of fulfilling intentions but also 1) reduce the delay between intention formation and fulfillment and 2) accelerate their completion. To investigate these possibilities, we gave 105 participants the task to read a 14,300-word expository text and answer comprehension questions online within five days. Throughout this period, we periodically sampled participants' intention-related thoughts using their mobile phones, collecting around 10-12 samples per day.
As a result, the more frequently participants thought about the reading task, the earlier they started reading. Additionally, those who thought more about the task after initiating it tended to finish the task earlier. Additional analyses of thought characteristics (i.e. valance and activation) and activities while experiencing intention-related thoughts like complexity and perceived importance are discussed.