We investigated whether focalonfocal effects (e.g., ) in prospective memory (PM) are explained by cue differences in monitoring difficulty. In Experiment 1 we show that syllable cues (used in Einstein et al.) are more difficult to monitor for than word cues; however, initial-letter cues (in words) are similar in monitoring difficulty to word cues (Experiments 2a and 2b). Accordingly, in Experiments 3 and 4 we designated either an initial-letter or a particular word as a prospective memory cue in the context of a lexical decision task, a task that presumably directs attention to focal processing of words but not initial-letters. We found that the nonfocal condition was more likely than the focal condition to produce costs to the lexical decision task (task interference). Furthermore, when task interference was minimal or absent, focal PM performance remained relatively high whereas nonfocal PM performance was near floor (Experiment 4). Collectively, these results suggest that qualitatively different retrieval processes can support prospective remembering for focal versus nonfocal cues.
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