Prospective Memory: Progress and Processes

This chapter discusses that prospective memory appears to represent an interesting challenge to currently formulated memory theory because remembering needs to occur without an external agent to prompt remembrance or reconstruction of past experience. Such prompting presumably initiates the retrieval processes embraced by many if not most contemporary theories. Memory processes that operate more automatically are assumed to underlie performance on indirect retrospective tests of memory, tests for which interrogation of memory is also not prompted by an external agent. It is concerned with the processes that support such recollection or retrieval. The chapter discusses that a handful of variables typically associated with conceptually driven processes impacts prospective remembering. These results converge on the conclusion that prospective remembering is a conceptually driven process, despite a priori speculation that prospective memory has more in common with data-driven indirect tests. Inasmuch as common direct retrospective tests such as recall and recognition are also conceptually driven, this pattern suggests processing similarities between prospective memory and recognition and recall. It studies variables that presumably increment familiarity did influence recognition, but did not have a positive impact on prospective remembering. It appears, then, that automatic process in prospective memory is more akin to those displayed on conceptually driven indirect tests, which thus far do not play a key role in current models of recognition. An alternative framework is based on automatic activation mechanisms and on the assumption that the critical representation on which these mechanisms must operate is the target-action association.