Prospective memory: Faulty brain, flaky person.

Abstract

Abstract Prospective memory is the cognitive function required for formulating plans and promises, for retaining them, and for recollecting them subsequently either at the right time or upon the occurrence of appropriate cues. We depend on this function for many any everyday tasks, such as, for brewing a perfect cup of tea, for picking up groceries en route home from work, and for meeting colleagues and friends at the right time and place. Despite the ubiquitous involvement of prospective memory in everyday life, it is still poorly understood and rarely covered in introductory psychology books and even in more specialized texts on human cognition. On the assumption that this neglect reflects at least in part a failure to understand the distinction between prospective and retrospective memory, I begin this article with a definition of both memory functions and with an elucidation of the requirements which are unique to prospective memory tasks. The remainder of the article summarizes research which has served to identify differences between prospective and retrospective memory, with a focus on research related to personality variables and other individual differences (e.g., the presence or absence of obsessive compulsive tendencies). The last section of the article reports new research on the different interpretations we make of retrospective and prospective memory failures, and more specifically, of the fact that that the former tend to be viewed as cognitive failures while the latter are viewed as character flaws. A theory of mind which explains why we make such different interpretations might give prospective memory the place it deserves in our texts and on our research agendas. Keywords: prospective memory, memory failures, attribution of memory failures, interpretation of memory failures, Munset hypothesis, character flaw Research on prospective memory is booming. For the past decade, the rate of growth in publications on prospective memory has outpaced the growth rate of the world's fastest-growing economies, and year after year, questions about prospective memory are being asked from an ever increasingly wider range of perspectives. Despite such extraordinary developments, however, it seems that prospective memory, in Rodney Dangerfield's words, can't get no respect, and as a consequence, it is today still either completely omitted or mentioned only in passing in the vast majority of introductory psychology textbooks and even in more advanced books that are focused on human cognition. Why? A complete exploration of this question is beyond the scope of this article. However, I believe that textbook authors' neglect of this topic is at least in part due to a misunderstanding of what prospective memory is and, more specifically, due to a failure to grasp the essential and important differences between prospective and retrospective memory, complemented by a lack of appreciation of the special functions served by prospective memory in our everyday life and in our social interactions. As President of the Canadian Psychological Association, I have been given this special opportunity to address psychologists from all branches of our discipline and from all corners of the country, and I wish to use it to increase understanding of and appreciation for prospective memory. I begin this article with a definition of prospective memory, highlighting how it differs from that which ought to be called retrospective memory, but which - in the absence of knowing about prospective memory - most of us simply regard as memory. By means of examples from research in my labouratory at the University of British Columbia, as well as from other labouratories, I will illustrate a few facts that are solidly established about prospective memory, in the hope of convincing you that this neglected aspect of memory matters both in and out of the labouratory. The subtitle of this article is a clue about the special status we accord to prospective memory in our everyday life. …