ABSTRACT
A t least since the days of William James’s functionalism, context informa-tion has been regarded as paramount in importance to human cognitive processing (e.g., Carr, 1925). More specically, we have known for quite some time that retrospective memory is sensitive to the explicit manipulation of context (e.g., Feingold, 1914), as would be the case when students perform somewhat more poorly on examinations when tested in a room different from the one where the original instruction took place (e.g., Abernathy, 1940). Our contribution to this volume examines the role of context information in prospective memory because it has received so little explicit attention to date. Recently, we made the claim that the eld of prospective memory could benet greatly if it attempted to tie its ndings back more directly to the theories and principles of retrospective memory from whence it originally sprung (Marsh, Cook, & Hicks, 2006a). Our chapter represents a slightly larger scale attempt at doing so than we would expect of the average scholar examining data in his or her laboratory for a given line of
research. Nevertheless, we hope that our contribution will provide a good example of how prospective memory data can be tied back to important principles and canons of retrospective memory. We begin with a very brief summary of the kinds of context effects that are typically found in research on retrospective memory. We then selectively revisit published prospective memory work that has protably capitalized on contextual manipulations to affect intention completion. Finally, we dene two contextual associations that may be important in fullling intentions. We also provide the reader with examples of our most recent work demonstrating that context effects occur robustly in prospective memory, and moreover, that they probably deserve more attention than they have heretofore received.
