New Delhi: Researchers have discovered that forgetting routine behaviours occurs when environmental cues fail to trigger one's memory of that intention at the right moment, and the intention gets lost in the shuffle. The researchers at the University of Notre Dame, US, came upon these findings while conducting experiments to better understand a certain lapse in the ability to remember critical but routine behaviours such as turning off the oven when one leaves the house for the day. Researchers term this prospective memory.
The researchers in this study also found that prospective memory errors could happen to anyone. "You process those (cues) more automatically, so you can get lost in your thoughts because your behaviours are being driven by the environment. It's not that you forget what it is you're supposed to be doing; you're just forgetting to do it at the appropriate moment," said Nathan Rose, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology at the university. The findings are published in the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition.
In this study, Rose and colleagues designed experiments to measure if and how college students could forget their cellphones - something most are dearly attached to and that could have serious consequences for them if forgotten. The researchers took the cellphones of 192 Notre Dame students while they participated in an unrelated experiment and then examined how often the students forgot to retrieve their phone when they left the lab at the end of the experiment, and whether it mattered if they were given explicit reminders to grab the phone once the experiment was complete.
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For the study, students were also given activity trackers to attach to the back of their waistbands. One group was reminded to ask for their cellphone and to return the tracker when finished; the other group was not. After the students finished the unrelated experiment, they were debriefed and guided to an exit, while the experimenters pretended to go on with business as usual - watching to see if and when the participants remembered to retrieve their phone or return the tracker.
About 7 per cent of students forgot their cellphones without the reminder, compared to almost 5 per cent of those who were reminded. Nearly 18 percent of either category forgot to return the tracker. The study was performed in the context of 496 children in the US having died of pediatric vehicular heatstroke since 1998, because their caregiver forgot they were in their car. The data quoted by the study is from NoHeatStroke.org.
The researchers in this study theorised that the same way the students missed the environmental cues to remind them to pick up their phone or return the tracker, so it is for parents who are driving to work or running errands with a baby in the backseat. "The absence of salient visual and auditory cues from a child who is sleeping in the backseat creates a scenario conducive to forgetting the child is in the car," the researchers wrote.
Rose also explained that memory errors occur at the same frequency between men and women. "When you talk about the forgotten baby scenarios, people often make assumptions about who forgets their babies, who the caregivers are," said Rose. "And there's no evidence to support the idea that men are more likely to commit this kind of error than women, or vice versa," said Rose. (PTI)
