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If you’ve experienced this phenomenon, you’ve had a prospective memory lapse.

Memory usually means remembering things that have already happened. But prospective memory is the ability to remember to do something in the future – such as stopping to get milk on the way home from work, calling your mom on her birthday, or remembering to take your casserole out of the oven. Sometimes, errors lead to heartbreaking results – such as forgetting to take your toddler out of the car on a hot day.

I am a clinical neuropsychologist and a professor of psychology and neuroscience. For the past 30 years, my research has focused on this phenomenon, measuring prospective memory and looking for treatments to help those having problems.

Carrying out future intentions

Prospective memory is the ability to remember to remember, or to remember to carry out a future intention.

A future intention can be retrieved in two different ways. One is in response to something in your environment, such as a sight or a sound, that serves as a cue to do an intended action. Researchers like me call this an “event.” For instance, you see your co-worker and remember you have a message for them; you hear the timer go off and remember to turn off the sprinklers.

The other way is in response to time. Your dental appointment is scheduled for 2 p.m., but you plan to exercise for 30 minutes first.

One possible explanation for how people retrieve a prospective memory is known as the multiprocess theory.

According to this theory, sometimes you have to put forth effort to remember, such as checking the time repeatedly until it gets to be 2 p.m. Other times the memories come to you without effort, such as when you hear an alarm. As the above examples suggest, memories that have time-based cues, like 2 p.m., are usually more difficult to remember than those that have event-based cues, such as an alarm.

Brain regions at play

Older adults tend to lose prospective memory as they age. This may be because of brain changes in the aging prefrontal cortex.

But it’s not all bad news. Older adults actually seem to do better than younger people in some situations when they are asked to remember things in their daily lives. We call this the age-prospective memory paradox.

The part of the brain that seems most responsible for prospective memory is an area of the frontal lobes, referred to as Brodmann’s area 10. This area is involved with holding information in mind while doing a different simultaneous task.

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