Gone but not forgotten: The effects of cancelled intentions on the neural correlates of prospective memory

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were used to examine the neural correlates of the prospective interference effect and the effects of canceling an intention on the neural correlates of prospective memory. The response time data revealed a prospective interference effect that was associated with the engagement of prospective retrieval mode and item checking. The ERP data revealed that item checking was associated with sustained activity over the frontal and occipital-parietal regions of the scalp beginning at around 300 ms after stimulus onset. The ERP data also revealed that canceling an intention may have blocked the retrieval of the intention from memory when the prospective cue was encountered and led to a significant attenuation in the degree that the neural correlates of cue detection and post-retrieval processes were expressed. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.