ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on one of the most characteristic features of prospective memory (PM), namely, on the spontaneous experience when a planned action suddenly “pops in to mind” while we are engaged in other activities:
The point of departure of this chapter is the notion that successful prospec tive remembering is, at least in part, determined by the individual’s prepared ness, or sensitivity, to identify a given event as a PM cue for the planned action. Retrieval sensitivity is assumed to reflect effects of and interactions among (a) the level of activation of the underlying event representations (referred as the trace-dependent component of PM), (b) the characteristics of the cue event for triggering the planned action (cue-dependent component), and (c) the individual’s attentional resources for task monitoring and self-initiated retrieval operations (capacity-dependent component).
