Theories Of Prospective Memory Research Articles

Supplemental Material for Wait a Second . . . Boundary Conditions on Delayed Responding Theories of Prospective Memory

Supplemental Material for Wait a Second . . . Boundary Conditions on Delayed Responding Theories of Prospective Memory

Prospective Memory of Death in Old Norse and Icelandic Sources

This article borrows from the field of cognitive psychology to add nuance to Jan Assmann’s notion of a prospective cultural memory of death. Whereas Assmann’s view accounts primarily for those cultures that tend to rely upon external honor and social status to formulate a sense of prospective memory of death, those cultures that tend to rely upon internal conceptions of righteousness or culpability have little representation in Assmann’s theory. For more than two decades, the field of cognitive psychology has been developing its own theory of prospective memory. There, prospective memory is the memory of (typically mundane, everyday) tasks an individual must accomplish at some point in the future (e.g., buying milk, meeting someone, or running an errand). Certain memory aids (e.g., a note in a calendar or a string tied around a finger) might assist individuals in the retrieval of prospective memories. So too might material, literary, or folkloric aids be culturally employed to assist a culture in remembering its prospects for death, dying, and the afterlife. This article explores ways that cognitive prospective memory might be useful in understanding how prospective cultural memories of death and the afterlife might have changes in Old Norse-Icelandic sources as the region’s religious landscape developed during the transitions from pre-Christian to Christian, and then from Catholic to post-Reformation, worldviews.

Neural evidence of the strategic choice between working memory and episodic memory in prospective remembering

Theories of prospective memory (PM) posit that it can be subserved either by working memory (WM) or episodic memory (EM). Testing and refining these multiprocess theories of PM requires a way of tracking participants' reliance on WM versus EM. Here we use multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) to derive a trial-by-trial measure of WM use in prospective memory. We manipulated strategy demands by varying the degree of proactive interference (which impairs EM) and the memory load required to perform the secondary task (which impairs WM). For the condition in which participants were pushed to rely more on WM, our MVPA measures showed 1) greater WM use and 2) a trial-by-trial correlation between WM use and PM behavior. Finally, we also showed that MVPA measures of WM use are not redundant with other behavioral measures: in the condition in which participants were pushed more to rely on WM, using neural and behavioral measures together led to better prediction of PM accuracy than either measure on its own.

Prospective memory: when reminders fail.

A frequent assumption in the area of prospective memory is that a reminder to do an activity in the future improves the likelihood of doing the activity. The results of four experiments indicated, however, that the most general version of this assumption is incorrect. Subjects were either reminded of a prospective memory task several times during a retention interval or not reminded of the prospective memory task. The most effective reminders referred both to the prospective memory target events and to the intended activity. Reminders that referred only to the target events did not improve prospective memory (relative to a no-reminder control). Reminders that referred only to the intended activity did improve prospective memory, but not to the level of reminders that referred both to the target events and to the intended activity. Instructions to imagine oneself performing the prospective memory task did not further improve prospective memory. Neither the delay between the prospective memory instructions and the prospective memory cover task nor the delay between a reminder and a prospective memory target event significantly influenced performance. The results, which are discussed in terms of theoretical and practical implications, support a new theory of prospective memory and suggest surprising conditions under which reminders fail to benefit prospective memory.