Prospective memory and the Big Five personality dimensions

Prospective memory is remembering to perform an action at some future point. The current study investigated the relationships between personality and the engagement of preparatory attentional processing, which is associated with successful prospective memory performance, by examining the cost to the ongoing lexical decision task. In the current experiment prospective memory performance was associated with significant cost to the ongoing task, in accordance with the preparatory attentional processes theory (PAM; Smith, 2003, 2008), which proposes that prospective memory tasks require resource demanding preparatory attentional processes. The personality dimensions of Conscientiousness and Agreeableness were related to both prospective memory performance and prospective memory target recognition; while Neuroticism and Openness were related only to the cost to the ongoing task.