Vita and Research Information
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Prospective memory is memory for actions to be performed in the future
such as remembering to give a message to a friend, remembering to take
medication, and remembering to turn off the oven. It has often been
contrasted with retrospective memory, which is memory for past events
such as memory for a list of words learned in an experiment, memory for
the plot of a recently seen movie, and memory for the names of former
teachers. Interestingly, until the last 15 years or so, nearly all
memory research focused on examining retrospective memory.
Although there are potentially many interesting dimensions
along which prospective memory and retrospective memory tasks differ,
our focus has been in understanding the differences at retrieval. A
characteristic of explicit tests of retrospective memory is that the
experimenter at some point puts the participant in a retrieval mode
(Tulving, 1983) and directs participants to retrieve previously
experienced episodes. By contrast, prospective memory requires that at
some point in the future, individuals remember to perform an action
without being put in a retrieval mode by an external agent. A typical
paradigm for studying prospective memory, for example, involves asking
participants to remember to press a key whenever they see a particular
target item in the context of an ongoing task (such as rating words for
pleasantness). Here participants are not explicitly asked (e.g., by an
experimenter) to search memory when the target event occurs. Thus, when
a prospective memory target event is encountered, attention needs to be
switched from seeing the item as an item to be rated to thinking about
the item as a cue for an intended action.
My long-term colleague, Mark McDaniel, and I believe that we use
multiple processes for prospective memory retrieval with some being
relatively automatic and others more consciously controlled. The major
goal of our research over the past 15 years or so has been to
understand (1) what processes we use to remember to perform actions in
the future, (2) how these processes can break down in important
real-world situations (e.g., an air traffic controller forgetting to
reroute an airplane), (3) how these processes are affected by normal
aging.