Remembering intentions is critical for daily life, yet errors happen surprisingly often, even when there are fatal consequences, as in the “forgotten baby syndrome”. To study how people forget personally-important intentions, we took 192 students’ cell phones and attached an activity tracker to their clothes while they participated in an unrelated experiment in our lab. We examined how often students forgot to retrieve their cell phone (personally important task) and return the tracker (experimenter relevant task) when they left the lab, and whether it mattered if the instructions were explicitly encoded or not. Students only forgot the tracker 10-13% more often than their cell phone, and explicit instructions did not reduce forgetting; neither did longer, more distracting ongoing tasks. Between 60-70% of participants said the intention “popped into mind”. We suggest that PM intentions are “autonomically” encoded, yet even personally important tasks are forgotten at surprising rates.
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