ABSTRACT

This chapter reviews empirical evidence of metacognitive monitoring and control processes across the prospective memory (PM) phases. Metacognitive PM processes are of theoretical importance to PM research. Most PM theories posit that PM costs are, partly, under metacognitive control. It seems fair to conclude that many PM theories assume that people have some metacognitive awareness of and expectations about their PM abilities in different task contexts, which in turn control their strategic approach to a PM task. In retrospective memory, early speculations that people might have direct access to the strength of their long-term memory trace were dismissed for an inferential account positing that people draw upon various cues in their memory predictions that are not always valid and can hence explain often observed prediction error. Cues that may be particularly relevant to people’s PM predictions are dependent upon the kind of PM task.