Prospective Memory

Prospective memory is memory for future intentions, remembering to do something later rather than remembering something that already happened. Einstein and McDaniel's (1990) framework splits it into two types: event-based, where an intention is triggered by an external cue (seeing a teammate's health bar, for example, should trigger the intention to activate a heal), and time-based, where the intention must fire at a specific moment with no external cue at all, such as recalling to re-ward a map area every 90 seconds. Time-based prospective memory is consistently harder, since it depends on self-initiated monitoring rather than an environmental trigger, and both types compete for the same limited attentional resources as whatever task is happening in the moment.

Reference: Einstein & McDaniel, 1990. The NeuroRank implementation holds the canonical form and scales interference via task-irrelevant stimulus density.

1. Remembering to check the minimap for a scheduled objective spawn without a UI element prompting you.
2. Recalling to swap a consumable or ability loadout at a planned round or wave threshold set before the match started.
3. Intending to call out a cooldown the instant it comes off cooldown, competing against whatever fight is happening at that exact moment.

NeuroRank does not run a dedicated delayed-intention task, since a genuine prospective memory test requires a delay of minutes to hours between forming the intention and the trigger moment, longer than any single combine module. The closest adjacent signal is the Tilt module's Bet Under Pressure phase structure, where players must carry a planned response strategy across intervening trials rather than react to each one in isolation.