Salience prompts

Salience prompts are spaced repetition prompts designed not so much to assure recall but rather to cause you to think certain thoughts when situations or mental states arise. For instance: you’ve just read about some best practice in keys for distributed databases, and a month later, you’re prototyping something that uses a distributed database. Does the best practice occur to you?

This is in some sense an implicit retrieval task. It’s not clear if Retrieval practice makes it more likely. My instinct is that it does… but what kinds of practice work best? What schedule is most appropriate? How to experimentally characterize salience prompts?

You can sort of implement these in a Spaced repetition memory system, but the scheduling is probably all wrong.

This seems similar to (and maybe the same as?) “spontaneous retrieval” in cognitive science. And possibly the “prospective memory” literature?

  • “Prospective memory (PM) refers to the ability to remember to execute an intention in the future without having a permanent reminder.”
    • Mello, B., Matos, P. & Albuquerque, P.B. The role of cue salience in prospective memory commission errors in nonperformed nonfocal tasks. Cogn Process 25, 395–402 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-024-01190-4
      That’s… sort of what I mean. The experimental design seems to focus on instructions, though (“when you see this kind of cue, press this button”), rather than semantic knowledge.

Related, of course, to Retrieval practice and transfer learning

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Last updated 2026-05-23.