This study investigated, in a laboratory setting, whether prospective memory (remembering to perform intended actions in the future) would be improved by self-enactment of the to-be-remembered tasks. The subjects, 45 university students, were asked to remember later to perform five tasks that they initially enacted themselves, watched the experimenter perform, or had described to them. These tasks were to be performed, ostensibly in preparation for the next subject, at the end of 30 min of filler activity, which was presented as the experimental task. Surprisingly, self-enactment produced the poorest prospective remembering. Speculative explanations are offered in terms of both metacognitive expectations about memory and output-monitoring deficiencies.

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In a study examining the effects of reminding expectations on prospective remembering, participants were asked to perform three internally and three externally cued tasks following a 30-minute ®ller activity. Experimental participants were informed that at the time for performance they were to: remind another (confederate) participant about the tasks; receive a reminder about the tasks from the confederate; or both. Control participants heard nothing about reminders. Those led to expect a reminder performed signi®cantly fewer tasks than did those who were not, regardless of whether they were to provide a reminder. Those expecting to provide a reminder performed more tasks than did those who were not, but this difference was only marginally signi®cant. In all conditions, signi®cantly more externally cued than internally cued tasks were performed. Reminding expectations appear to have affected retention of the content of to-be-performed tasks, rather than retention of the intent to perform them. The results are discussed in terms of modi®cations to the activation levels of the to-be-performed activities and/or to participants' self-reminding strategies as a function of reminding expectations.

The influence of instructional set, centrality, and relevance on change blindness was examined. In a one-shot paradigm, participants reported alterations of items across pairs of driving scenes under two different instructional conditions. Alterations involved either relocations or disappearances of the same items and included driving-relevant and driving-irrelevant alterations to items of central and marginal interest. Three main findings emerged: Centrality was not a function of driving relevance/meaningfulness, disappearances of central interest items were identified significantly more often than positional changes to them, and instructions highlighting the importance of the task to driving attenuated change blindness. The possible role of a simple listing strategy in mediating successful identification of alterations is discussed. Together, the findings demonstrate that cognitive factors play an important role in change blindness.

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