In five of the 27 major U.S. airline accidents between 1987 and 2001 in which the NTSB found crew error to be a causal factor, inadvertent omission of a normal procedural step played a pivotal role. Such omissions are a form of prospective memory error. My research group is attempting to link real-world prospective memory phenomena with task demands and with underlying cognitive processes. I briefly summarize studies from three quite different but complementary approaches: ethnographic studies, analyses of accident and incident reports, and laboratory studies. Five types of situation presented prospective memory challenges: episodic tasks, habitual tasks, atypical actions substituted for habitual actions, interrupted tasks, and interleaving tasks/monitoring. An experimental study found that inadequate encoding, inadequate cueing, and competing demands for attention make individuals vulnerable to forgetting to resume interrupted tasks.
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