High Social Motivation Can Promote Time-Based Prospective Memory Performance

Prospective memory, the ability to remember to execute a preplanned activity, is important in social interactions, insofar as such interactions frequently involve preplanned activities. The importance of prospective memory varies across different social contexts and individuals generally make greater efforts to ensure the completion of prospective memory tasks under high social motivation conditions compared to low social motivation conditions. We aimed to investigate the effects of various levels of social motivation on prospective memory. A single-factor between-subjects experimental design was implemented to explore the influence of social motivation intensity on time-based prospective memory and its processing mechanism. We found that only the high social motivation group demonstrated superior prospective memory performance compared to the control group. The high social motivation group also had slower response speeds in response to the ongoing tasks than both the control group and the low social motivation group, but the number of strategies used was not different among the three groups. Moreover, in comparison with the control group, the high social motivation group monitored time more frequently. The results suggest that only high-intensity social motivation can promote time-based prospective memory performance, and increased attention consumption is necessary for the occurrence of this effect.