ABSTRACT
I imagine I was invited to discuss the papers because of my very early contribu-tion to this area, which consisted of a single paragraph describing a real-life experiment on memory and aging (Moscovitch, 1982). In that study, Nina Minde21 found that older adults were as good or better than younger adults at keeping phone appointments. This age advantage on naturalistic tasks as compared to an age deciency on laboratory-based tasks is now known as the age prospective memory paradox and has been studied extensively since then (see Phillips, Henry, & Martin, chap. 8, this volume). I return to it at the end of this commentary. I also noted that some people have incorporated some ideas from my neuropsychologically based, component process model (Moscovitch, 1992, 1994; Moscovitch & Winocur, 1992) into their theories of prospective memory (see especially the work of McDaniel & Einstein summarized in this). Although I have a nodding familiarity with some of the current literature on the topic, my comments are not those of an expert, but of an interested observer. From that point of view, I found the following chapters in this book by Kliegel, Jäger, Altgassen, and Shum (chap. 13, this volume), West (chap. 12, this volume), and Burgess et al. (chap. 11, this volume) to be not only enjoyable, but enlightening.
