The Five Stages Of Prospective Memory

Prospective memory involves remembering to carry out an intention within the future or remembering to remember. The term is properly defined as ‘the ability to remember to perform an intended action at a particular moment in the future’ (Cona et al. 2014). This type of memory goes hand in hand with retrospective memory, although prospective memory is concerned with ‘when’ something has to be remembered whereas retrospective memory is majorly concerned with ‘what’ has already happened (Baddeley, 1997). Prospective memory tends to have a low information content (Baddeley, 1997), for example remembering to take a prescription, but not what the pills contain within them. Within the essay, a range of theories and research will be presented and evaluated relating to prospective memory.
Prospective memory involves five stages according to (Ellis & Freeman 2008). Encoding occurs first, where information about what action needs to be carried out, when it should be carried out and the intention to act is stored. Retention is next where the stored information is retained for a certain amount of time and then when an opportunity presents itself, for example a specific meeting time, the intention is received from the long term memory – this is the Retrieval stage. Execution occurs next whereby after the intention is
Prospective and retrospective and are widely compared and contrasted. A fault in prospective memory can result in embarrassing consequences sometimes even fatal ones. For example, (Einstein & McDaniel, 2005) give an example of what can happen if prospective memory fails, “after a change in his usual routine, an adoring father forgot to turn toward the day-care centre and instead drove his usual route to work at the university. Several hours later, his son, who had been quietly asleep in the back seat, was dead.” (Baddeley et al.