Little is known about prospective memory (i.e., remembering to perform some action in the future such as remembering to pick up a loaf of bread on the way home), and even less is known about the effects of aging on prospective memory. This is a serious gap in the literature because many memory situations are prospective. For the elderly who often have special needs such as remembering to take medication and meeting health related appointments, good prospective memory is of utmost importance, Moreover, current theories of aging suggest that prospective memory should be especially problematic for the elderly. This project focuses on the development of a laboratory paradigm that allows systematic manipulation of independent variables and precise measure of dependent variables. Because past research on prospective memory has for the most part been conducted outside the laboratory, much of it suffers from problems of control and interpretation. The present project takes a comprehensive approach to the study of prospective memory. Young and old subjects will be tested on two different prospective memory tasks and three different retrospective memory tasks (short-term memory, free recall, recognition). Comparisons of subjects' performances across these memory tasks will help to identify the similarities and differences between prospective memory and more traditional retrospective memory tasks. These comparisons will also help to localize age-related deficits in memory processes. The seven proposed experiments additionally address basic theoretical and empirical issues regarding prospective memory. Specifically, subject age, the nature and difficulty of the concurrent activity during the prospective memory task, the characteristics of the target event, and the memory strategies used to remember the prospective memory task will be varied. The specific designs of the experiments were motivated by issues in prospective memory that should be especially revealing for better understanding the effects of aging and memory. Accordingly, these experiments will directly test recent theories that attempt to explain age-related memory deficits in terms of problems with self-initiated retrieval processes (Craik, 1986) and problems with inhibiting irrelevant thoughts from working memory (Hasher & Zacks, in press).