Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The present study was designed to examine actions people take in everyday life to prevent potential memory errors.Many past studies focus on the nature of forgetting, and additional studies have assessed cognitive interventions for thosewith varying degrees of impairment from aging or injury. However, there are a limited number of studies examiningeveryday remembering for healthy, functioning adults. In this study, across two experiments (n1=136; n2=85), participantscompleted a self-reported questionnaire regarding various types of daily prospective memory actions. We hypothesizedthat people would report using external memory aids (ex. technology) rather than internal aids (ex. mnemonics) andparticipants would report lower forget scores when using external aids. Results showed that participants overwhelminglyused external memory aids to prevent future memory errors for all tasks analyzed. Results also showed that levels of self-reported forgetting were not associated with particular types of preventative actions. Thus, the results imply that peopletend to use what they perceive to work.