ABSTRACT
Prospective memory is an extraordinarily important behavior in maintaining the fabric of one’s everyday life. To maintain social and professional function, an individual needs to keep appointments and remember plans for social events. Prospective memory is also viewed as an important component of maintaining one’s health. Not only must an individual remember to keep medical appointments, there is also a substantial prospective component to the performance of common health behaviors, including remembering to take medications; performance of monitoring tasks (e.g., monitoring blood glucose in diabetics); and compliance with other medical regimens that may involve diet, exercise, or other behavioral modications. In this chapter, we ask how important prospective memory is in complying with medical instructions. We make the case that there are different components of medical adherence, and that the prospective memory component is particularly reactive to contextual factors rather than to cognitive factors. Because of the important role of context in governing the prospective component of medical adherence, the individuals most vulnerable to prospective failures in adhering to medications are, quite surprisingly, younger rather than older adults. To make this case, we rst provide an overview of the different components of medical adherence behaviors.
