Enacting the Future

The fulfilment of delayed intended actions (e.g. taking medication or attending an appointment) is often described as a fairly common concern for healthy adults in everyday life and is a fundamental requirement for independent living across the lifespan. Such Prospective Memory (PM) may be particularly affected at an early stage in the development of Alzheimer's disease, placing at risk individual's social relationships and even the maintenance of an independent lifestyle. The use of enactment at encoding might represent a potentially important and widely applicable technique for enhancing PM in such patients since such benefits have already been observed across other mnemonic contexts. This book explores the benefits of enactment at encoding as well as those of a strong association between the intended action and the cue that should trigger it on PM performance for young and older adults. Encouraging findings are reported as being maintained across the lifespan, under high attentional demands, and even on more naturalistic paradigms and everyday contexts, hence having a potential impact on the developments of strategies to improve PM in Alzheimer's patients.