They forgot their “baby”?!: Factors that lead students to forget their cell phone
Prospective memory (PM) is critical for daily life, yet errors happen often, even when there are dire consequences. What factors make errors more or less likely to occur? While most researchers explicitly instruct subjects to perform abstract tasks with little personal relevance, we argue that PM in daily life often involves personally relevant intentions that are more “autonomically” encoded. When 192 students came to the lab to participate in an unrelated experiment, we took their cell phone and attached an activity tracker to their clothes. We examined how often students forgot to retrieve their cell phone (personally relevant task) compared to returning the tracker (experimenter relevant task) before leaving the lab, and whether it mattered if the instructions were explicitly or more autonomically encoded. Students only forgot the tracker 8-14% more often than their cell phone, and explicit instructions did not reduce forgetting; neither did longer retention intervals nor a mismatch between encoding-retrieval context. At retrieval, (60-70%) participants said the intention “popped into mind”. We discuss both the role of processes outside of awareness in PM intention formation and retrieval, and how this research helps to understand the “forgotten baby syndrome”.