CounterpartsCounterpartsThe Memory Field GuideDirectory
RetrievalAI: partial

Prospective memory

Remembering to do something later — the memory that fires itself at the right moment.

○ armedpick up milk on the way home
    an intention is armed — no timer, no alarm; it’s waiting for a moment that matches

    In the brain

    Remembering to do something later — take the medicine at eight, pass on the message. Unlike memory for the past, a prospective memory has to fire itself at the right moment, cued by a time or an event, while you’re busy with something elseEinstein 1990. It leans on prefrontal monitoring and a spontaneous retrieval when the cue finally appears.

    The model

    An intention stored together with a trigger — time-based (“at 8pm”) or event-based (“when I see Katie”) — that has to be noticed and executed without an explicit prompt to remember it. The hard part is the noticing.

    In AI

    Thin. Assistant “reminders” (Meta’s proactive-reminder patents) and cognitive architectures like ACT-R cover narrow, scheduled forms. But a general agent that spontaneously acts on a stored future intention when a matching context appears — not when it’s asked — is barely built. engram listed it as a TODO; Counterparts now ships it as a module — an intention resurfaces when a matching date or context arrives, as an inclination rather than a reminder.

    The map

    Prospective memory — anticipated in narrow forms (ACT-R/Soar; Meta US11567788B1).

    3 prior-art references

    1 post-priority (field context, not prior art)

    Open ground. Genuine prospective memory for agents — self-triggering intentions that fire on context, not on a prompt — is largely unclaimed.

    How an AI memory can do this

    Every AI memory makes a choice about this mechanism, whether or not its makers name it.

    Counterparts is an AI memory modeled on human memory; its home page shows each of its mechanisms, this one included. See it on the Counterparts home

    The directory rates 12 AI memory systems on the same eleven mechanisms, in plain language and with sources.

    Compare them side by side

    References

    Sources

    1. G. O. Einstein & M. A. McDaniel (1990). Normal aging and prospective memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: LMC, 16(4).

    From The Memory Field Guide: every source, the full landscape of patents, papers and open-source systems, and the method behind it.