Machines Like Us

Prospective memory is "remembering to remember." Despite the pervasiveness of this requirement in real-life, we know surprisingly little about the topic. In their new book, McDaniel & Einstein provide a direly needed review of this fascinating new field, providing important information for researchers, clinicians, and laypeople alike on how basic cognitive science is coming to a "big picture" understanding of prospective memory.

In some ways, it's not so much a single topic as an amalgam of many different cognitive processes already studied in other domains. For example, prospective memory involves the formation of goals, memorization, and recall. Although these and other similarities belie the relationship of prospective memory to more traditional research topics, their interactions have not been well-addressed outside the field of prospective memory.

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