The effect of recent reminder setting on subsequent strategy and performance in a prospective memory task

Abstract

The effect of recent reminder setting on subsequent strategy and performance in a prospective memory task The technological advancement that is rapidly taking place in today's society allows increased opportunity for "cognitive offloading" by storing information in external devices rather than relying on internal memory. This opens the way to fundamental questions regarding the interplay between internal and external memory and the potential benefits and costs of placing information in the external environment. This article reports the results of three pre-registered online experiments investigating the consequences of prior cognitive offloading on A) subsequent unaided ability, and B) strategic decisions whether to engage in future cognitive offloading. We administered a web-based task requiring participants to remember delayed intentions for a brief period and manipulated the possibility of setting reminders to create an external cue. Earlier cognitive offloading had little effect upon individuals' subsequent unaided ability, leading to a small and nonsignificant drop in subsequent performance. However, there was a strong effect on participants' subsequent likelihood of setting reminders. These findings suggest that the short-term impact of cognitive offloading is more likely to be seen on individuals' strategy choices rather than basic memory processes.

Individual Differences in Working Memory Capacity Predict Benefits to Memory from Intention Offloading

“…Because offloading can be used to circumvent capacity limitations associated with maintaining and remembering the intention, our primary hypothesis was that the positive relation typically seen between WMC and PM without reminders would be reduced (or eliminated) with reminders in both laboratory and naturalistic settings. Of course, this conflicts with the aging results discussed earlier in which both age groups show mostly comparable improvements from offloading (Henry et al, 2012;Scarampi & Gilbert, 2020), as well as recent evidence from the retrospective memory domain indicating that low working memory participants do not necessarily benefit more from short-term memory offloading (Morrison & Richmond, 2020).…”

“…During external trials (i.e., reminders), participants are allowed to preemptively move the target near the location to which it eventually needs to be dragged (i.e., offload memory demands). Consistent across all studies using a similar version of this task is that PM performance is better with offloading than without (Gilbert, 2015b;Gilbert et al, 2020;Landsiedel & Gilbert, 2015;Scarampi & Gilbert, 2020), particularly under increased demands (Gilbert, 2015b).…”

“…Because aging is associated with declines in executive functioning (Braver & West, 2008;Hasher & Zacks, 1988;West, 1996), it stands to reason that older adults should benefit the most from offloading. However, Scarampi and Gilbert (2020) found that while both groups improved with reminders in laboratory settings, older adults did not show a significantly greater benefit than younger adults (see Henry et al, 2012 for a similar pattern using a Virtual Week task). Likewise, in naturalistic settings where older adults often do better than younger adults (referred to as the age-PM paradox), research has found that older adults sometimes report using fewer reminders than younger adults (e.g., Rendell & Thomson, 1993), and age benefits can be seen even after controlling for reminder usage or when instructing participants not to use reminders (e.g., Rendell & Craik, 2000).…”

“…For example, a neon sticky note can be posted near the medicine bottle, which in turn can stimulate intention retrieval in a more automatic fashion by reducing PM processing demands (i.e., making it easier to notice the medicine bottle). Although offloading is a promising solution to reduce memory errors, relatively little is known about the mechanisms underlying PM offloading, who might benefit most from offloading, and whether similar offloading processes operate in laboratory and naturalistic settings (but see Gilbert et al, 2020;Haines et al, 2020;Scarampi & Gilbert, 2020;Risko & Gilbert, 2016). The purpose of the current study is to better understand each of these issues.…”

Harder Than You Think: How Outside Assistance Leads to Overconfidence

“…The current findings contribute to the understanding of the consequences of distributed cognition. Off-loading can lead to downstream effects, such as forgetting (Kelly & Risko, 2019), reduced effort (Risko et al, 2017), and altered memory strategies (Scarampi & Gilbert, 2020). Our experiments show how external aid can generate overconfidence.…”