Ecological Prospective Memory: Grounding Prospective Control within Nested Affordances

Every day, people plan to do something at some point in the future-with varying success remembering to do it. This challenge has inspired decades of research on prospective memory (PM), or how organisms are able to set an intention in the present and successfully execute it later in the future. Dominant theories of PM rely on representational, computational accounts and propose dual-process systems of attentional monitoring and spontaneous retrieval, which we refer to as cue and capacity (C&C) models. We present an alternative grounded in ecological psychology and argue for a more parsimonious account for PM performance through ecological concepts. We propose that directly perceiving information from the environment allows people to move from intention-in-the-present to realization-in-the-future as part of an extended action via nested affordances (or how taking advantage of existing opportunities for action scaffold to reveal opportunities for goal execution). We demonstrate the utility of this approach by drawing on research from skill acquisition in sports, where successful performance depends on coordinating action over time in dynamic environments. Grounded in nested affordances and the tenets of ecological psychology, we will propose a spatiotemporal specificity model and present a future research agenda to explore.