PSYCHOLOGY MASTER'S THESIS ABSTRACT

Misha Behbehani

MA-Research
August 2005

The Effects of Importance and Culture on Prospective Memory

    Prospective memory (PM) involves remembering to perform a future action in response to a specific circumstance or time.  The present study investigated the effects of task importance and cultural differences on PM.  Importance to perform future tasks was manipulated by the presence or absence of a disabled experimenter who needed the tasks to be done.  Culture involved comparison of Euro and Asian Americans participants, representing individualistic versus collectivistic societies, respectively.  Six PM tasks were to be completed following a 30 minute distractor task.  Regarding importance, it was hypothesized that participants would remember to perform more tasks when the experimenter was disabled.  It was also hypothesized that collectivistic participants would remember more tasks than individualistic participants, particularly in the high importance condition.  Contrary to our hypothesis, Euro Americans performed better in the high importance condition than Asian Americans.  This unexpected effect is related to issues of authority figure presence and in-group versus out-group membership.

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