ABSTRACT

Maylor’s and Dobbs and Reeves’ excellent reviews show that prospective mem­ ory has become a generic label for a narrow range of experimental paradigms, most of which tell us little about how memory is used to control behavior. Dobbs and Reeves acutely observe that this is partly because the literature is dominated by the unhelpful question as to whether an hypothetical “prospec­ tive” “memory system” is functionally distinct, or shares the “performance characteristics” attributed to “retrospective memory” by a century of research. Both reviews explicitly acknowledge, or implicitly illustrate, other weak ques­ tions that have distracted investigators from fruitful research on how people actually use their memories to predict and plan their future behaviour.