Prospective memory

Prospective memory may be defined as remembering to remember (Winograd, 1988). It differs from retrospective memory, where passed actions, events, or knowledge are remembered. Prospective memory consists of recalling an action or an intention. This recall is triggered by either a stimulus or 'cue' or a time. For example, meeting a friend (the cue) might remind you to pass on a message (the intention). A time-based example would be remembering to watch TV at 8pm, or recalling a meeting or appointment at a certain time.



Attention
A current debate is the extent to which prospective memory requires attentional resources to identify a cue. That is, prior to meeting the friend to whom you need to pass on the message, are any attentional resources devoting to maintaining this intention? The preparatory and attentional and memory process (PAM) theory (Smith, 2003; Smith & Bayen, 2004) argues that some resources are always necessary. In contrast, the multiprocess model (McDaniel & Einstein, 2000) argues that a process as important as prospective memory would have a number of underlying mechanisms. They further argue that the properties of the prospective task, the nature of what you are doing at the time, and a number of other variables will influence whether cue identification is automatic or effortful. Relatedly, it has also been argued that it may be how hard you perceive that it will be to identify the cue that mediates how much effort is used to monitor for it (Hicks, Marsh & Cook, 2005; Marsh, Hicks & Cook, 2005). Current research evidence suggests that effortful monitoring is not always required to identify cues (Hicks, Marsh & Cook, 2005, Einstein et al., 2005). This is consistent with the intuitive experience of an intention spontaneously 'popping' to mind.