Outsourcing Memory To External Tools: A Review Of ‘Intention Ofoading Part 1
Dec 08, 2023
Abstract
How do we remember delayed intentions? Three decades of research into prospective memory have provided insight into the cognitive and neural mechanisms involved in this form of memory.
Delayed intention and memory are closely related. Delayed intention refers to postponing the time to achieve a goal. This behavior often requires more effort and persistence but can lead to better results. Memory refers to people's ability to store, maintain, and recall information again. It plays an extremely important role in personal learning and life.
The relationship between delayed intention and memory is that together they promote self-improvement and growth. By setting goals and strengthening their will, people are better able to work hard to achieve their plans, and efforts over a longer period can develop better behavioral habits and stronger perseverance. These will have a positive impact on memory.
Habitually delaying gratification is directly related to memory. When we can say no to simple quick rewards, we are better able to inspire our own belief in self-control and purpose. In this way, we can store information in our brains more efficiently and follow the correct steps to recall it when needed. At the same time, this can also effectively reduce stress caused by overloaded work.
Therefore, people should cultivate the intention to delay and improve their memory. Whether it is work, study, or other aspects of life, this is crucial. Establishing clear goals, using the right tools and methods to achieve them, and giving yourself enough time to balance your life and work will help you become a better, happier, and more successful person. people. It can be seen that we need to improve memory, and Cistanche deserticola can significantly improve memory because Cistanche deserticola is a traditional Chinese medicinal material that has many unique effects, one of which is to improve memory. The efficacy of minced meat comes from the various active ingredients it contains, including acid, polysaccharides, flavonoids, etc. These ingredients can promote brain health in various ways.
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However, we depend on more than just our brains to remember intentions. We also use external props and tools such as calendars and diaries, strategically placed objects, and technologies such as smartphone alerts. This is known as 'intention ofoading'. Despite the progress in our understanding of brain-based prospective memory, we know much less about the role of intention offloading in individuals' ability to fulfill delayed intentions.
Here, we review recent research into intention offloading, with a particular focus on how individuals decide between storing intentions in internal memory versus external reminders.
We also review studies investigating how the intention of loading changes across the lifespan and how it relates to underlying brain mechanisms. We conclude that intention offloading is highly effective, experimentally tractable, and guided by metacognitive processes. Individuals have systematic biases in their offloading strategies that are stable over time.
Evidence also suggests that individual differences and developmental changes in offloading strategies are driven at least in part by metacognitive processes. Therefore, metacognitive interventions could play an important role in promoting individuals' adaptive use of cognitive tools.
Keywords
Metamemory · Memory · Metacognition · Prospective memory · Cognitive offloading.
Introduction
An essential prerequisite for living an independent and purposeful life is the ability to form, and subsequently fulfill intentions. Intentions are mental representations of future goals and actions, which form part of the causal mechanism by which those goals and actions are eventually fulfilled or executed (Bratman, 1987; Grünbaum & Kyllingsbæk, 2020; Mele, 1992; Pacherie & Haggard, 2010; Searle, 1983).
However, as everyone knows, intentions often go unfulfilled. This can be for many reasons, such as a lack of opportunity (Dholakia & Pbagozzi, 2003), motivation (Cook et al., 2015), or reprioritization (Marsh et al., 1998). But a prominent cause of intentions going unfulfilled is a failure of memory. Everyone has had the experience of intending to do something, but finding that it has 'slipped their mind'.
Indeed, diary studies suggest that 50–70% of everyday memory failures reflect a failure to remember delayed intentions, rather than other forms of memory such as remembering facts or names (Crovitz & Daniel, 1984; Terry, 1988). This raises an obvious question: what are the mechanisms by which we remember delayed intentions, and how might these mechanisms be facilitated so that we can fulfill our intentions more effectively?
These questions have been addressed by studying 'prospective memory'. More than three decades of research have delivered insights into the cognitive mechanisms by which we remember intentions, their underlying neural correlates, and the way that they change across the lifespan, in neurodevelopmental conditions, and in cases of brain damage or disease (for reviews, see Brandimonte et al., 1996; Cohen & Hicks, 2017; Kliegel et al., 2008b; McDaniel & Einstein, 2007; Rummel & McDaniel, 2019; Scullin et al., 2015).
Much of this research has been based on experimental or laboratory tasks in which participants are first asked to remember one or more intentions, and then their ability to fulfill these intentions is measured. For example, participants might be asked to perform an ongoing task such as sorting stimuli into words versus non-words, while also remembering a prior intention to press a third button when a predefined target word appears (Einstein & McDaniel, 1990).
These studies help to explain the brain-based mechanisms by which individuals remember intentions. But we use more than just our brains to remember intentions. We also rely on external props and tools such as diaries, calendars, sticky notes, strategically placed objects, other individuals, and increasingly digital technologies such as smartphones or wearable device alerts.
These are all examples of 'intention offloading' – the process of creating a cue in the external environment to trigger a delayed intention. As a result of intention offloading, intentions are stored in our extended physical and social environments, not just in our brains.
However, while the brain-based mechanisms for remembering intentions have been extensively studied in recent decades, these extended mechanisms have received far less attention.
The purpose of this review is to summarise a line of research over the last 5–10 years seeking to investigate the intention of loading. This is an example of the broader phenomenon of cognitive offloading, which has been defined as the use of physical action to alter the information processing requirements of a task to reduce cognitive demand (Risko & Gilbert, 2016).
Everyday examples of cognitive offloading include diverse phenomena such as external normalization (tilting one's head to perceive a rotated image, reducing the need for mental rotation; Risko et al., 2014); using a GPS device instead of internal memory to guide navigation (Brügger et al., 2019); storing to-be-remembered information in written form (Kelly & Risko, 2019; Lu et al., 2020; Risko & Dunn, 2015), on computers (Morrison & Richmond, 2020; Storm & Stone, 2014) or via photography (Barasch et al., 2017; Henkel, 2014; Soares & Storm, 2018); or searching for information on the internet via a search engine, rather than in internal memory (Ferguson et al., 2015; Fisher et al., 2015; Hamilton & Yao, 2018; Marsh & Rajaram, 2019). Here, we focus on the specific phenomenon of intention offloading; for a more general review, see Risko and Gilbert (2016).
e argue that this line of research is useful on both a theoretical and a practical level. On a theoretical level, the phenomenon of intention offloading is an example of 'extended' or 'scaffolded' cognition (Clark & Chalmers, 1998; Heersmink & Sutton, 2020; Hutchins, 1995; Kirsh, 1996).
It provides a testbed for understanding the interrelations between numerous cognitive processes that are typically studied in isolation, such as memory, planning, metacognitive monitoring and control, and decision-making. It also allows us to investigate how these cognitive processes vary between individuals, across the lifespan, and in neurodevelopmental conditions. On a practical level: intention ofoading works.
As discussed below, external reminders can have a large impact on whether or not individuals fulfill their delayed intentions. By understanding the mechanisms of intention of loading, we can aim to improve individuals' adaptive use of cognitive tools.
Previous experimental studies have manipulated whether reminders are provided or not, as a means of measuring how much, if at all, they improve performance (Guajardo & Best, 2000; Guynn et al., 1998; Henry et al., 2012; Kliegel & Jäger, 2007; Lourenço & Maylor, 2015; Mahy et al., 2018; Meacham & Colombo, 1980; Ryder et al., 2022; Vortac et al., 1995).
Using this approach, researchers can investigate the impact of experimenter-provided reminders on behavior. This is important for understanding the relative efficiency of different types of reminders. For example, reminders of the prospective memory cue (when do I need to act?) may be more effective than reminders of the associated action (what do I need to do?; Ryder et al., 2022).
However, very few experiments have given participants a free choice about whether or not to set reminders and then measured the strategy that participants choose (for two exceptions, see Einstein & McDaniel, 1990; Maylor, 1990). Therefore, while some studies have investigated the consequences of reminders, very few studies have systematically explored the causes of reminder-setting. The latter question will be the main subject of this review.
Our review is organized as follows. First, we address issues of measurement: How can intention offloading be measured, and what does this reveal about individuals' preference or bias towards using external reminders versus internal memory processes?
Second, what are the processes that trigger the intention of loading? We consider the influence of metacognition, effort-avoidance, and strategy perseveration. Third, how does intention offloading change across the lifespan, in child development and older age? Fourth, how does the intention of loading relate to underlying brain mechanisms? Finally, we discuss some practical implications and suggest some promising directions for future research.
Measuring Intention Ofoading
A key step in advancing our understanding of prospective memory came from the development of paradigms that allowed it to be studied in the laboratory or clinic. Prominent approaches include the 'Einstein-McDaniel' procedure (Einstein & McDaniel, 1990), the 'virtual week' paradigm (Rendell & Craik, 2000), neuropsychological instruments such as the multiple errands test and six-element test (Shallice & Burgess, 1991), the hotel test (Manly et al., 2002), the breakfast task (Craik & Bialystok, 2006) and clinical tools such as CAMPROMPT (Wilson et al., 2005).
Without exception, these paradigms require participants to remember delayed intentions without assistance from external tools or reminders. Indeed, laboratory studies of prospective memory have tended to consider the intention of loading as a source of unwanted noise that obscures 'real' prospective memory processes (Uttl & Kibreab, 2011).
However, an alternative viewpoint is that intention offloading plays a key role in our ability to fulfill intentions in everyday life. So if we are to understand the processes by which intentions are fulfilled, then the intention offloading needs to be considered alongside purely brain-based mechanisms rather than being considered as a nuisance. But how can intention ofoading be measured experimentally?
Gilbert (2015a) developed an experimental paradigm for this purpose that could be administered as an online web-based experiment (see Fig. 1). Participants are instructed to drag ten numbered circles in numerical sequence to the bottom of a box shown on the screen. Delayed intentions are embedded within this task, by presenting instructions at the beginning of each trial, for example, 'Please drag number 3 to the top instead'.
Therefore, participants are asked to produce a nonstandard response when they encounter a specific future cue. If they forget the intention, they can produce a standard ongoing response instead (dragging the circle to the bottom of the screen) and there is no physical characteristic of the target circles that directly cues their status as special items that require a nonstandard response.
These characteristics match standard laboratory prospective memory paradigms such as the Einstein-McDaniel procedure. However, whereas previous studies of prospective memory typically impose retention intervals of minutes or longer between participants encoding intentions and acting on them, here the retention interval is on the order of seconds.
There are two ways in which participants performing this paradigm can remember intentions. They can remember the instructions with brain-based memory processes.
Alternatively, they can set reminders by immediately dragging target circles next to their instructed location at the beginning of the trial, for example dragging the '3' circle next to the top border of the box as soon as the trial begins, so that it location will remind the participant of the instruction when they get to this number in the sequence. This can be considered analogous to placing an object next to your front door so that you remember to bring it with you when leaving the house tomorrow.
In experiments using this paradigm, participants are typically instructed about this strategy and told that they have a free choice about whether to set reminders in this manner or simply remember intentions using their internal memory processes. The rate of reminder setting (i.e., the proportion of target circles for which participants set up reminders in this way) can then be measured.
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