The effect of verbal praise on prospective memory

Abstract

Verbal praise is often used to improve prospective memory performance in daily life. According to the motivation cognitive model, the promotional effect of verbal praise on prospective memory may depend largely on redeploying attentional resources, so its promotional effect is likely to be influenced by attention. Two groups of college students (n = 128, n = 117) participated in two experimental studies that examined this hypothesis. Experiment 1 manipulated attention load by changing the difficulty of the ongoing tasks to focus on the effect of verbal praise on prospective memory under different attention load conditions. The results showed that verbal praise promoted prospective memory performance under both attentional load conditions (low, high), but verbal praise mainly promoted the prospective component when the attentional load was low, meanwhile, verbal praise mainly promoted the retrospective component when the attention load was high. Experiment 2 altered the dependence of prospective memory tasks on attentional resources by manipulating the cue focality, further exploring the promotional effect of verbal praise on prospective memory with different types of cues under the low attention load condition. The results showed that verbal praise only promoted prospective memory when non-focal cues were used. The results of this study partially verified the motivation cognitive model.