Prospective Memory Analysis

Prospective memory is the act of remembering to perform a task in the future in everyday life (Meacham & Singer, 1977); the spontaneous retrieval may be due to: creating a forethought, keeping the forethought in memory while performing other tasks, using the forethought when the appropriate tasks appears, and analyzing the performance of the outcome (Freud, 1901; Ellis, 1996). For example, on the way home remembering to pick up a loaf of bread when you see the grocery store or passing by your colleague and remembering to give her a message (Brandimonte, Einstein, & McDaniel, 1996). These are examples of event-based memory ; external cues from the environment trigger the brain to export the intended action (Einstein & McDaniel, 1990). Additionally,

2016). Environmental cues are shown to be associated with the hippocampus for spontaneous retrieval (Gordon, Shelton, Bugg, McDaniel, & Head, 2011). Moreover, in the MIST test conducted by Palermo et al. (2016), found that women performed better on event-based tasks then men. Females have an advantage in relying on environmental cues more than men. Another structure in retrieval of information is the frontal lobe (McDaniel et al. 1999). McDaniel, Glisky, Rubin, Guynn, Routhieaux (1999), found that participants with high-functioning frontal lobes compared to low-functioning frontal lobes performed better in prospective memory. This observation came from conducting a study by giving participants a multiple-choice test and eight target questions that appeared throughout the test. High-functioning frontals allows for associating the questions with the right letter and associating the eight spontaneous cues with the right letter but the low-functional frontals capture to much attention just on the multiple-choice questions and cannot register the eight cues. Similarly, focal performance on prospective memory has positive correlations between the hippocampus and parahippocampal in brain volume, while the hippocampus has the strongest correlation (Gordon0020et al. 2011). Although, this is not the same for nonfocal tasks. Unlike nonfocal tasks, focal task over lapoverlap with external cues allowing a spontaneous retrieval of a memory (Gordon et al., 2011), the gender differences could be due to the hippocampus development during childhood (Pruessner et al., 2001). The hippocampus is known for retrieval of information and is an important factor in the remembrance process of prospective memory (Palermo et al. 2016). Similarly, both genders prospective memory starts to decline but this does not mean everyday life activities are impaired (Henry, MacLeod, Phillips, & Crawford, 2004).