ABSTRACT
A pending goal is a goal that has been stored in long term memory for eventual achievement For example, one might have a pending goal of mailing a letter later in the day, or of buying milk at the grocery store. How do people remember to achieve pending goals? It has been suggested that pending goals are spontaneously associated at encoding with one or more situations under which they might be achieved (Hammond, Converse, Marks, & Seifert, 1993). In this way, opportunities to achieve pending goals are recognized because the opportunities themselves serve as retrieval cues. A number of experiments (Patalano, Hammond, and Seifert, 1993) have shown that recognition of opportunities to achieve pending goals improves when the goals are associated at encoding with concrete descriptions of later opportunities. For example, encoding the goal of mailing a letter (e.g., by thinking of the fact that there is a mailbox on the way to work) increases the likelihood of actually remembering to mail the letter upon passing the mailbox.
