Investigating the role of cognitive load on prospective memory performance across event and mixed cues retrievals.

Prospective memory (PM) is remembering to perform a delayed action in the future. Several reminders can initiate prospective memories (future events and actions). At any given time, people plan to execute several tasks in the future, the success of which depends on the successful retrieval of reminders for actions. Such scenarios justify using mixed cues (event and time) as this would increase the chance of success in future task completion. The present study explores one such possibility, where mixed cues signal future task execution. To determine the effectiveness of mixed cues on future task performance, we tested scenarios with simple and complex task paradigms. We hypothesize that mixed cues guarantee higher success rates for future task completion as they will provide more contextual information. However, this benefit would decrease with the increased complexity of future tasks. Our study suggests that mixed cues improve chances of success for both simple and complex task future tasks, with simple tasks showing higher improvement than complex tasks.