Remembrance of Things Future: Prospective Memory in Laboratory, Workplace, and Everyday Settings

Abstract

Prospective memory involves remembering—and sometimes forgetting—to perform tasks that must be deferred. This chapter summarizes and provides a perspective on research and theory in this new and rapidly growing field. I explore the limits of existing experimental paradigms, which fail to capture some critical aspects of performance outside of laboratory settings, and review the relatively few studies in workplace and everyday settings. I suggest countermeasures to reduce vulnerability to forgetting to perform deferred tasks, identify roles for human factors practitioners, and propose a research agenda that would extend the current understanding of prospective memory performance.