Prospective Memory as a Very Important Role in Everyday Life - Essay Example

191114 A monument can be defined as a cluster of intentional results, made concrete in the form of an artificial product which is visible though space and which maintains this visibility through time. Criado 1995: In the above article, Criado says that a monument is not only a thing of the past, but also it belongs to the future, because it is built for the future by the past and should be viewed as such. Retrospective and Prospective memories are connected with one another in the same way. They both belong to the same person, because any individual has both and both are essential to have a proper life. Prospective memory is the memory of the functions that one has to perform in near and far future and is an opposite to retrospective memory which is remembering the past and the past events. Prospective memory is also about remembering to perform a certain action as planned either at a future date or at a future time. It is neither the past action, nor the present; it is the future and the connected actions that we decide to undertake at a planned time, at this hour, or on this day, or before this day, or before this month. There is no doubt that this is a highly significant part of human psychology that should be given immense attention through studies and researches. But somehow it has not been so. Scholars in the field grumble that very little research is done in this area, and there exists an awful gap in the research. Prospective memory pitted against the age still remains a widely speculated field with hardly any worth-mentioning research. It is connected with the triggering of memory or the cue for such an initiative and it is also connected with the time-based stimulus of intention. This brings home the necessity of possessing attentional resources to identify the resources of the intention. Recently there had been some intense studies about the topic from both time based and event based angle. There are also studies from the disease point of view, especially Parkinson's and Alzheimer. This paper goes through the recent researches conducted in the above fields of prospective memory. Talking about the importance of research in the field, one paper is of the opinion that: "There are at least three reasons why research in prospective remembering is highly relevant. Firstly, prospective memory is of great relevance for everyday life. Secondly, prospective memory is of enormous clinical relevance. Thirdly, prospective memory research is of tremendous theoretical relevance" Kleigel and Martin (2003). Prospective memory plays a very important role in everyday life as most work that an individual intends to do is related to it. "Prospective memory plays a predominant role in everyday living. Our lives are directed towards the future, with plans and actions forming a major component of this" Mizuno, http://www.tyg.jp/tgu/school_guidance/bulletin/k9/images/01mizuno.pdf In their research Einstein et al (1995, 1996), after diligent and painstaking experiments, came to the conclusion that there is an age-related variation in the prospective memory region and this affects the capability of a person, mainly because the older people do not think about the task or the time, as much or as clearly as the younger people do. "The major feature of this view is that self-initiated thoughts, such as thinking about the prospective memory task and monitoring the time, simply occur less often in older adults." This study also renders another explanation for the specificity effect saying that the categorical intentions require more self-initiated processing than specific intentions do. It had always been an accepted fact that age affects the person's memory. Still, this argument remains quite ambiguous and open to criticism. There is much research which says that it need not be so. But the age-old, accepted belief that it does affect. Still it is a difficult field to come to a conclusion and needs many more researches. There is another argument that since it is a very well-known and well accepted fact that a person who is aging will have mental and physical problems, not only the society, but also the individual accepts, dwells and develops many incapabilities, both physical and mental and the difficulties in the region of prospective memory could be simply one amongst many such difficulties. This does not make it scientifically or psychologically proven. The time based prospective memory is another field that has been attracting research lately. In a prominent naturalistic study, aiming to find out the relationship between the thinking and remembering processes, those being the two important elements of prospective memory that largely remain unexplored, the researchers tried to find out many points and their reasons. They explored the relation between thinking about and acting on intensions' processes and how these intentions come to mind. They tried the experimental approach with a wearable 'active badge' devise that automatically records the activities of the wearer, and measured the reactions. They also conducted study on distribution of thoughts in relation to target opportunities. This illustrative experiment arrived at the conclusion that "Time task may in fact impose a greater load on retrospective memory in that the critical conditions to be remembered are more complex" Sellen et al (1997, p.504). Another research examined the 'self-reported rehearsal processes in naturalistic time-based prospective memory tasks'. This research went into the experiments assuming that 'one of the most crucial factors of all prospective memory tasks is an absence of explicit prompts to instigate the recall'. Their study thinks that research in this field is progressing in a very rapid pace. They thought that the self-reports support the 'Random-Walk' model of perspective remembering suggested by Wilkins in 1979 and this model highlighted the significance of remembrance cues to initiate the intentions. Study says: "According to Wilkins, our mind can be conceptualized as a multidimensional semantic space". According to Wilkins, retrieval of intention is not a self-initiated process. Their study compared the Random Walk with the TWTE (Test-wait-test-exit) of Harris and Wilkins (1982). TWTE says 'people encode the future task and then wait for a period of time until a test of memory seems appropriate. If the time is not correct, they continue to wait until the critical exit period. Successful performance is therefore dependent on monitoring the time during the critical period'. Studies were conducted on a large number of candidates and the results depend on the various experiments on internal triggers, self-initiation, thinking about the time, cues, deadlines, reminders, timely interventions in the thought process, and time tables etc. The study concluded that "self-initiated rehearsals, occurring when people are engaged in deliberate planning of their daily activities, were reported on very few occasions by both young and old participants" and this indicates that "only by forming a future intention can one become sensitive to incidental external cues that are not otherwise easily noticeable to people who do not hold such an intention" Kvavilashvili and Fisher (2007, p.127). In the increased accessibility of time-based and event-based Prospective memory tasks the results showed that they "may have increased accessibility in comparison with other (retrospective) memory representations in long-term memory". On the experiments in another field of prospective memory and ageing paradox, the study shows that the old participants were as good as the young participants and this is in sharp contrast with the earlier studies. This study provides new and startling insights in conclusion, into the processes and mechanisms in the prospective memory procedures that are time based in day-to-day life of people. It has brought out interesting information about the age-related issues that this should form a firm ground for future researches in this area. Of all the three papers, this particular paper seems to have arrived at immensely useful conclusions. In recent years, especially after the onset and spreading of Parkinson and Alzheimer like diseases, an extreme necessity had been felt to know more about the prospective memory. Till recently all the studies were more focussed on the retrospective memory, memory of childhood, how it could alter the life, how we can colour and glorify those distant memories and how they dominate the rest of our lives consciously or sub-consciously as Dr. Freud himself had given enormous importance to these memories of childhood. Now the psychological sciences are equally interested in the prospective memory of the human mind. Conducting research on the retrieval of intention and executive resources, another study concludes: "Apart from an effect on processing of environmental stimuli, there was no effect of the load manipulation on prospective memory. This implies that retrieval of the intention from memory does not require the availability of executive resources, which is in line with the automatic associative memory system model" Berg (2002). An earlier research was of the opinion that timely realisation of intention is very important and if that is not done, it could be highly fragile. "Our suspicion is that people in general do not realize that retrieved intentions that cannot be realized immediately are quite fragile. Often, retrieved intentions are so salient at the moment that they create the misimpression that they are indelible, at least over very brief delays" McDaniel and Einstein (1988). It is important to notice when a PM is interrupted so that the task could be done immediately after the interruption goes away. Interrupted PM and its power of relegating the task into the background could spoil many intentions. "When an ongoing task is interrupted, a PM task is created - one must remember to resume the interrupted task after the interruption. The PM target that should cue resumption is the end of the interrupting task. Individuals may forget to resume an interrupted task in part because the unexpected interruption diverts their attention and prevents them from explicitly encoding an intention to resume. Also, in real-life, interrupting tasks are often followed by other ongoing tasks that continue to divert attention from the interrupted task". http://interruptions.net/literature/Dodhia-PS03.pdf Some scholars argue that prospective memory could be linked to the gene and this is a frightening thought because such a gene could be a dangerous one. "Otherwise healthy adults who carry the so-called 'Alzheimer Gene can suffer significant problems in later life with one of the functions of memory known as prospective memory. Unlike memory for past events prospective memory relates to things in the future. Prospective memory is best thought of in terms of intent and content. For example, 'I must go to the shop (intent) and pick up some bread content)". http://alzheimers.about.com/od/research/a/prospective.htm Many researches are going on in the medical field to understand the nature and effect of this gene. Another study found out that there has been a link between chronic back pain and the PM: "These findings provide new insights into prospective memory dysfunction in people with chronic pain. Possible mechanisms for this dysfunction are discussed and suggestions for future research given". Ling et al (2007). These claims still remain weak and wait to be explored further. Talking about both retrospective and prospective memories, yet another study concludes: "ProM has been decreed as a distinctive aspect of memory that forms the logical, natural complement of RetM, that is required for many everyday activities, and whose breakdown may be as debilitating as impairments in RetM. Graf and Uttle (2001, p.447). In another study conducted by Graf himself says that the process of aging could definitely decrease the accuracy of estimating the time. " Overall, aging is accompanied by a decrease in the accuracy of estimating time, but this decrease appears to depend on the method adopted for conducting the investigation as well as on the range of the to-be-timed durations that are under scrutiny. Graf and Grondin http://www.worldscibooks.com/lifesci/etextbook/5937/5937_chap1.pdf Another major side of prospective memory is the event based perspective memory and research goes on quite frequently in this area. To put it in a simpler form, it is only an intention to remember to perform an action when a certain event occurs, like giving a message if you meet a certain person and thus, it becomes an event based task. Time and event based studies are absolutely crucial for this area. "Both time-based and event-based prospective memory tasks constitute a crucial form of memory use in our daily lives, but despite the importance of this form of memory, research on prospective memory was minimal until recently" (Einstein & McDaniel, 1996). Study on Parkinson's says: "These findings suggest that prospective memory components of event based and time based prospective memory tasks may be mediated by different neural networks, and dissociation in prospective memory impairment in Parkinson's disease may be attributable to selective impairment of these neural networks" Katai et al (2003). All the above show that time based perspective is very different from the event based one. It is more so, because time based perspective memory is the intention of doing a work at a given time, or at an appointed time, or within a given or agreed upon time. Here time perspective is highly crucial. If that particular task is not done within that intended time, it could be perhaps useless to do it later. Hence, remembering the time differently in a connected way is very important and the researches shows that time remembrance with a difference is significant to prospective memory. Time that is remembered simply does not have much importance here. But remembering the time with the already formed intention of performing a task connected to the prospective memory is the crucial thing in the time based factor. Hence, the intention and cue, though important, do not function well, if the time based prospective memory does not click on the time differently. This also shows how important the prospective memory is in diseases similar to Parkinsons, and hence, even for the medical field it is important to research further in this area. There are also many issues connected here. First of all the connection between the retrospective memory and prospective memory are crucial and should be explored further. Equally important are the connection between prospective memory loss and various sicknesses that usually come in the later days of life. It is necessary to know how and which part of the PM could be retrieved so that the illnesses could be contained. Here, medical sciences can do research from various angles of psychology, psychiatry, medicine, health and cure. Then two major factors of prospective memory have to be understood completely. Both time-based prospective memory and the event based prospective memory are too important to be ignored. The research papers that are quoted above are the most prominent research that has been conducted in recent years. Still much more work has to be done in this field. BIBLIOGRAPHY: 1. Berg, S.M. van den, (2002), Prospective Memory, from Intention to Action, UNIVERSITEIT EINDHOVEN. 1. Einstein, Giles et al, 'Aging and Prospective Memory: Examining the Influences of Self-Initiated Retrieval Processes', Journal of Experimental Psychology; Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 1995, Vol. 21, No. 4,996-1007. 2. Graf, Peter and Uttle, Bob, Prospective Memory: A New Focus for Research, Consciousness and Cognition 10, 437-450 (2001) 3. Kleigel, Matthais and Martin, Mike (2003), Prospective Memory, The Delayed Realisation of Intentions, Psychology Press Publications. 4. Kvavilashvili, Lia and Fisher, Laura, 'Is Time-Based Prospective Remembering Mediated by Self-Initiated Rehearsals Role of Incidental Cues, Ongoing Activity, Age and Motivation,' Journal of Experimental Psychology: 2007, Vol. 136, No. 1, 112-132. 5. Katai, S. et al, 'Event based and time based prospective memory in Parkinson's disease', J. Neurol. Neurosurg. Psychiatry 2003;74;704-709. 6. Ling, Jonathan et al, 'Short term Prospective Memory Deficits in Chronic Back Pain Patients', Psychosomatic Medicine 69:144-148 (2007). 7. McDanial, Mark A. and Einstein, Gilles O. (2007), Prospective Memory, Sage Publications, London. 8. Sellen, A.J. et al, 'What Brings Intentions to Mind Am in Situ Study of Prospective Memory,' Memory, 5:4, 483 - 507. ONLINE SOURCES: 1. http://www.tyg.jp/tgu/school_guidance/bulletin/k9/images/01mizuno.pdf 2. http://interruptions.net/literature/Dodhia-PS03.pdf 3. http://alzheimers.about.com/od/research/a/prospective.htm 4. http://www.worldscibooks.com/lifesci/etextbook/5937/5937_chap1.pdf 5. Read More