Location-Based Prospective Memory

The aim of this thesis is to explore a previously unstudied type of prospective memory (PM), namely, location-based PM. People often have to remember to do things when in a particular location, such as buying tissues the next time they go to the supermarket. The event cognition literature supports the idea that location-based cues will be effective, while leaving open the question of whether multiple events will improve or impair performance. In the primary experiment, people delivered messages from store to store in a virtual shopping mall as an ongoing task, with two PM tasks per trial. Those tasks were received, and then were done, in either one or two locations. Experiment 1 provided preliminary evidence that the virtual environment and location cues were effective, while Experiment 2 indicated that people improved performance when they received instructions from two locations and performed both tasks in one.