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From retrospective to prospective memory research: a framework for investigating the deactivation of intentions

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Abstract

The definition of episodic memory has evolved into a multifaceted concept that gathered great attention in several research areas in psychology and neuroscience. Prospective memory (PM), or the ability to remember to perform delayed intentions at a later moment in the future, represents one side of this capacity for which that has been a growing interest. In this review, we examined a counterintuitive finding: PM intentions may persist and affect our behaviour despite successful goal attainment and task completion, which in daily life may be as serious as taking medication twice. This review aims to elucidate the existing knowledge and identify some unresolved questions concerning this specific memory failure. Therefore, this review provides an overview of the uprising research dedicated to both PM omission and commission errors, including an analysis of its definitions, of the current theoretical approaches of PM retrieval, and the main procedures used in this field to offer an integrative perspective on this topic. Finally, the last section is devoted to discussing future directions to test the predictions of our suggested theoretical explanations for PM deactivation. This might be an avenue for research that is likely to extend our understanding of episodic memory's usefulness in everyday life.

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Fig. 1
Fig. 2

Adapted from Scullin et al. (2012)

Fig. 3

Adapted from Bugg and Scullin (2013)

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Notes

  1. Spontaneous processes were originally thought to be somewhat unique to PM but current research on RM is increasingly focused on spontaneous retrieval of contextual information, too (see Dimsdale et al. 2018 for further details).

  2. Statistical evidence from accumulator models provide three key parameters that can be interpreted in a psychologically meaningful way: (1) the drift-rate parameter is an indicator of the speed of information processing; (2) the threshold parameter indicates how much information is gathered before a decision is made; and (3) the non-decision time parameter captures processes that precede and succeed the information accumulation process; Anderson et al. 2018). Recently, evidence from these accumulator models have been applied to data from a standard laboratory PM task (e.g., Heathcote et al. 2015).

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Funding

This study was funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) under Grant No. BD/123421/2016 to Patrícia Matos and the Portuguese Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education through the State Budget UID/PSI/01662/2019.

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Correspondence to Patrícia Matos.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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This is a narrative review study. The Research Ethics Committee for Social and Human Sciences has confirmed that no ethical approval is required.

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Handling editor: Roy P. C. Kessels (Radboud University); Reviewers: Arnaud Badets (University of Bordeaux), Beth Lloyd (Leiden University).

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Matos, P., Albuquerque, P.B. From retrospective to prospective memory research: a framework for investigating the deactivation of intentions. Cogn Process 22, 411–434 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-021-01016-7

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