ABSTRACT
S ince the publication of the rst edited book (Brandimonte, Einstein, & McDaniel, 1996) devoted entirely to prospective memory, or memory to execute an intended action at an appropriate point in the absence of an explicit request to remember, attention has increasingly been paid to the processes that mediate prospective memory. This has been made possible at least in part by clever new methods and alternate dependent measures that have permitted more sophisticated study of these processes. Traditionally, the primary dependent measure in prospective memory experiments has been a measure of prospective memory accuracy, such as whether a correct prospective memory response is made or the proportion of correct prospective memory responses that are made (e.g., Einstein & McDaniel, 1990). More recently, attention has turned to include alternate dependent measures. These include neural correlates of prospective memory (e.g., Burgess, Quayle, & Frith, 2001; West, Herndon, & Crewdson, 2001; West & Ross-Munroe, 2002), accuracies and latencies on the ongoing activity in which the prospective memory task is embedded (e.g., Guynn, 2003; Kliegel, Martin, McDaniel, & Einstein, 2001, 2004; Smith, 2003), and reaction times to prospective memory target stimuli in a context other than a prospective memory task (e.g., Einstein et al., 2005; Goschke & Kuhl, 1993; Marsh, Hicks, & Bink, 1998). These alternate dependent measures have enabled more analytic study of the processes underlying prospective memory. One of these processes, the evidence for which is provided by performance on the ongoing activity in which the prospective memory
task is embedded, is monitoring for the prospective memory target stimuli. These targets indicate when it is appropriate to execute the intended action (i.e., perform the prospective memory task), and monitoring for these targets is the focus of this chapter.
