Once established, goal reminders provide long-lasting and cumulative benefits for lower working memory capacity individuals.

Abstract

Previous research has shown that Stroop effects interact with working memory capacity (WMC) more strongly with lists of mostly congruent items. Although the predominant explanation for this relationship is goal maintenance, some research has challenged whether listwide effects truly reflect goal-maintenance abilities. The current study improved upon previous methodology by using both within-subject and between-subjects manipulations of goal reminder, increasing both the number of trials between reminders and the total length of the task to allow for greater goal neglect, and more precisely maintaining congruency proportion within each block. Participants completed the Automated Operation Span followed by a Stroop task in which they stopped every 24 trials to vocalize either a goal-reminder statement (“name the color not the word”) or a nongoal statement (“This is part of my intro to psychology class”). In the within-subject manipulation (Experiment 1), there was no consistent benefit for goal reminders over nongoal statements. However, in the between-subjects manipulation (Experiment 2), results demonstrated a strong benefit of goal reminders, such that goal reminders eliminated the relation between WMC and Stroop effects, whereas that relation was robust following nongoal statements. Moreover, the benefit of receiving goal reminders lasted for at least 24 trials and accumulated across the course of the experiment. These data provide strong evidence that goal reminders eliminate the relationship between WMC and Stroop errors and suggest goal reminders can be a useful intervention for those suffering from lapses in controlled attention. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)