ABSTRACT
The chapters by Maylor and by Dobbs and Reeves are in good agreement about a variety of issues-crucially, perhaps, on the point that prospective memory is not so much a type of memory as it is a set of abilities that depend on a broad range of underlying processes. It is “more than memory” in the words of Dobbs and Reeves. In fact, prospective memory may be nothing more than a unify ing label for a wide range of tasks involving the timely performance of planned actions. The decomposition of overall performance into its component processes is therefore essential, because so many factors can contribute to suc cessful completion of the target task. As the authors of the two preceding chap ters point out, some of these factors are not related to memory at all-for exam ple, compliance and the ability to judge how much time has passed-whereas others are only marginally related, like the setting up of external cues, and the number of time checks carried out in a time-based task. Some of the factors are more related to personality than to cognitive variables, and perhaps to ex perience in the real world of carrying out planned actions, including experi ence of the penalties associated with failing to carry them out. This heightened sensitivity to the responsible execution of plans, and to the negative conse quences of failing to execute the plans, is typically associated with the aging process. Older people were initially perceived as being better than their younger counterparts on prospective memory tasks (e.g. Moscovitch, 1982), although further work has made it clearer that the superiority is probably at tributable to the greater attention paid to compensatory strategies by older participants, rather than to the maturation of cognitive abilities. The observed
superiority may have less to do with the processes of aging than with the con trast between subjects who are still in school and those (even of the same age) who are employed, and are thus faced with harsher penalties for failure to carry out planned actions (cf. Loewen, Shaw, & Graik, 1990). One striking observa tion reported by Dobbs and Reeves is that noncompliance was responsible for almost one half of the failures to carry out prospective memory tasks in realworld settings. Presumably this proportion drops to almost zero in laboratory studies (there is nothing particularly aversive about pressing a key or asking for a red pen!), providing a further argument for bringing studies into the lab and focusing on the cognitive aspects of success and failure.
