Interview with Jack Meacham

The following is a Q&A with a prominent professor of developmental psychology, John ("Jack") Meacham, who retired from SUNY-Buffalo in 2006. The interview is spanned over two separate posts for readability reasons. The interview can also be downloaded from the sidebar as a word document, MeachamInterview_07.doc.

Ray: Recently I have been looking up the origin of the construct of prospective memory, and who coined this term. The earliest publication I could find is your article with Jennifer Dumitru in 1976 entitled Prospective Remembering and External Retrieval Cues. Who would you say coined this term and what could you tell me about its origin?

Jack: I coined the term "prospective remembering" in 1973 or 1974. I had earned my doctorate in psychology at the University of Michigan in 1972 and was then a new assistant professor at the University at Buffalo--The State University of New York. Burt Leiman was an undergraduate psychology student at the time. He later earned his doctorate in psychology at the University of Minnesota.

Our first (and only) study together was reported as a paper at the annual convention of the American Psychological Association in Chicago in 1975:

Meacham, J. A., & Leiman, B. Remembering to perform future actions. Paper presented at the meeting of the American Psychological Association, Chicago, September 1975.

I was pleased that Burt, on his own, traveled from Buffalo to Chicago for the paper presentation. But I was disappointed and embarassed that only a few people attended our paper session. It turned out that our paper session had been scheduled very late in the afternoon, around 5:00, at the same time that APA had scheduled various social hours for people to gather for drinks and conversation.

I tried two or three times through 1975 and 1976 to get this paper published in one of the psychology journals, but without success. I can see that the paper is not great--it was merely a first step. But I also think that the journal editors were concerned about publishing a paper on a topic that they had never heard about before.

Meanwhile, with other students, I completed several other studies on prospective remembering. One of these is the article with Jennifer Dumitru, that you mentioned, in the Catalog of Selected Documents in Psychology. Jennifer was an undergraduate student.

Another was:

Meacham, J. A., & Singer, J. Incentive effects in prospective remembering. Journal of Psychology, 1977, 97, 191-197. Jeff Singer earned his doctorate at the University at Buffalo and is now living in the Washington, DC area.

And:

Meacham, J. A., & Colombo, J. External retrieval cues facilitate prospective remembering in children. Journal of Educational Research, 1980, 73, 299-301. John Colombo also earned a doctorate in psychology, I think at the University at Buffalo, and has been working at the University of Kansas.

And:

Meacham, J. A., & Kushner, S. Anxiety, prospective remembering, and performance of planned actions. Journal of General Psychology, 1980, 103, 203-209. Susan Kushner was an undergraduate student.

Around this time came my lucky break! Ulric Neisser, a well-known cognitive psychologist (his book [Cognitive Psychology (1969)] helped define the field of cognitive psychology and was one of my main texts as a graduate student) asked if he ould reprint the 1975 APA paper in an edited book that he was preparing:

Meacham, J. A., & Leiman, B. Remembering to perform future actions. In Ulric Neisser (Ed.), Memory observed: Remembering in natural contexts. San Francisco: Freeman, 1982. Pages 327-336.

There is a footnote on the first page noting the 1975 convention presentation.

I think that the first paragraph of this book chapter, which would likely be the same (or quite similar) to the 1975 paper, has my initial ideas about "prospective remembering:"

"In remembering, one engages in various cognitive activities in order to reconstruct information that was known in the past. Not infrequently, such information has implications for actions to be performed in the future, such as stopping at the store on the way home, or keeping an appointment with the dentist. Remembering which involves such implications can be termed 'prospective remembering' and can be distinguished from 'retrospective remembering,' which is concerned solely with the recall of information about the past. For example, in order to deliver a message one must remember not only the message (retrospective) but also to seek out the person for whom the message is intended and to deliver the message (prospective)."

There are another half dozen paragraphs in this 1975/1982 paper in which I talk my way through this new idea, prospective remembering. So this chapter in Neisser's book would likely be your key source as far as indicating how I conceived of "prospective remembering" in 1975.

Well, Neisser's book was a huge hit! And this was the endorsement from a senior, well-respected psychologist and researcher that the new idea of "prospective remembering" needed. Right away, many people were conducting studies and using the term "prospective remembering" or "prospective memory."

About this time, I published an article in which I tried to put prospective remembering into a somewhat broader context:

Meacham, J. A. A note on remembering to execute planned actions. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 1982, 3, 121-133.

And I did the same somewhat later, from a different perspective, trying to link the construct of prospective remembering to the work of the philosopher John R. Searle. I had just read his book "Expression and meaning."

Meacham, J. A. Interpersonal relations and prospective remembering. In M. M. Gruneberg, P. Morris, and R. N.Sykes (Eds.), Practical aspects of memory: Current research and issues (Vol. 1). London: Wiley, 1988. Pp. 354-359.

I should note that during this period of the 1970's there were a few other researchers who were publishing articles that might be considered to fall under the umbrella of "prospective remembering," although initially they were not using this term: John Flavell and Steve Ceci in the United States, and A. D. Baddeley and A. Wilkins in Great Britain. But I didn't learn of any of their work until after I had completed several of my own studies.

Although I likely haven't cited it consistently, there is one book that I think was often on my mind as a graduate student in the late 1960's and that I was likely still thinking about as I was considering my first studies of prospective remembering:

Miller, George A., Galanter, E., & Pribram, Karl H. Plans and the structure of behavior. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1960.

See, in particular, their notion of TOTE schemas. TOTE is the acronym for test-operate-test-exit.

There's not a direct connection between TOTE and prospective remembering; I'm just saying this was likely part of the context within which I was thinking that might not be fully reflected in the reference lists for my articles.

You might also notice that in my articles (and also in this message) I've tended to say "prospective remembering," rather than "prospective memory." This reflects the influence of my dissertation advisor, J. David Birch, who was at the University of Michigan for many years and in the 1970's moved to the University of Illinois. Birch had been working with John Atkinson on a motivational theory ("The Dynamics of Action") that emphasized, as you can see by the title of their book, action or
activity. By extension, in thinking about memory, it made sense to think of memory not as a "thing" or "place" in the brain, but instead as something that people do, that is, the action or activity of "remembering."

If you are interested, there is a brief bio of me on the psychology department website at the University at Buffalo. I retired in December, 2006. I'm now living in Eugene, Oregon.