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Reminders such as calendar entries and digital alerts are highly effective at helping people remember what they need to do. Recent work has explored the triggers of reminder setting, also known as intention offloading, finding that low confidence is associated with more offloading in laboratory tasks. This supports a metacognitive model of cognitive offloading. Here, we investigated whether this model generalizes to real-world intentions. We asked 112 participants about their upcoming plans and subsequent fulfillment of those plans in two online surveys conducted in 2022. Participants were more likely to set reminders for plans that (a) they were less confident they would remember and (b) they judged to be more important. Participants with lower confidence that they would remember to return for the second survey were more likely to set a reminder for this plan. This, in turn, predicted greater fulfillment. Therefore, ironically, lower confidence predicted greater success. These findings show that intention offloading predicts fulfillment of real-world intentions. They also point toward metacognition as a target for interventions to facilitate this. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).
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Spontaneous and conversational laughter are important socio-emotional communicative signals. Neuroimaging findings suggest that non-autistic people engage in mentalizing to understand the meaning behind conversational laughter. Autistic people may thus face specific challenges in processing conversational laughter, due to their mentalizing difficulties. Using fMRI, we explored neural differences during implicit processing of these two types of laughter. Autistic and non-autistic adults passively listened to funny words, followed by spontaneous laughter, conversational laughter, or noise-vocoded vocalizations. Behaviourally, words plus spontaneous laughter were rated as funnier than words plus conversational laughter, and the groups did not differ. However, neuroimaging results showed that non-autistic adults exhibited greater medial prefrontal cortex activation while listening to words plus conversational laughter, than words plus genuine laughter, while autistic adults showed no difference in medial prefrontal cortex activity between these two laughter types. Our findings suggest a crucial role for the medial prefrontal cortex in understanding socio-emotionally ambiguous laughter via mentalizing. Our study also highlights the possibility that autistic people may face challenges in understanding the essence of the laughter we frequently encounter in everyday life, especially in processing conversational laughter that carries complex meaning and social ambiguity, potentially leading to social vulnerability. Therefore, we advocate for clearer communication with autistic people.
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Transtorno Autístico , Mapeamento Encefálico , Encéfalo , Riso , Imageamento por Ressonância Magnética , Humanos , Riso/fisiologia , Riso/psicologia , Masculino , Feminino , Adulto , Transtorno Autístico/fisiopatologia , Transtorno Autístico/diagnóstico por imagem , Transtorno Autístico/psicologia , Adulto Jovem , Encéfalo/diagnóstico por imagem , Encéfalo/fisiopatologia , Encéfalo/fisiologia , Córtex Pré-Frontal/diagnóstico por imagem , Córtex Pré-Frontal/fisiopatologia , Córtex Pré-Frontal/fisiologia , Estimulação AcústicaRESUMO
How do people decide between maintaining information in short-term memory or offloading it to external reminders? How does this affect subsequent memory? This article presents a simple computational model based on two principles: A) items stored in brain-based memory occupy its limited capacity, generating an opportunity cost; B) reminders incur a small physical-action cost, but capacity is effectively unlimited. These costs are balanced against the value of remembering, which determines the optimal strategy. Simulations reproduce many empirical findings, including: 1) preferential offloading of high-value items; 2) increased offloading at higher memory loads; 3) offloading can cause forgetting of offloaded items ('Google effect') but 4) improved memory for other items ('saving-enhanced memory'); 5) reduced saving-enhanced-memory effect when reminders are unreliable; 6) influence of item-value: people may preferentially offload high-value items and store additional low-value items in brain-based memory; 7) greatest sensitivity to the effort of reminder-setting at intermediate rather than highest/lowest levels of task difficulty; 8) increased offloading in individuals with poorer memory ability. Therefore, value-based decision-making provides a simple unifying account of many cognitive offloading phenomena. These results are consistent with an opportunity-cost model of cognitive effort, which can explain why internal memory feels effortful but reminders do not.
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Intention offloading refers to the use of external reminders to help remember delayed intentions (e.g., setting an alert to help you remember when you need to take your medication). Research has found that metacognitive processes influence offloading such that individual differences in confidence predict individual differences in offloading regardless of objective cognitive ability. The current study investigated the cross-domain organization of this relationship. Participants performed two perceptual discrimination tasks where objective accuracy was equalized using a staircase procedure. In a memory task, two measures of intention offloading were collected, (1) the overall likelihood of setting reminders, and (2) the bias in reminder-setting compared to the optimal strategy. It was found that perceptual confidence was associated with the first measure but not the second. It is shown that this is because individual differences in perceptual confidence capture meaningful differences in objective ability despite the staircase procedure. These findings indicate that intention offloading is influenced by both domain-general and task-specific metacognitive signals. They also show that even when task performance is equalized via staircasing, individual differences in confidence cannot be considered a pure measure of metacognitive bias.
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Individualidade , Intenção , Metacognição , Humanos , Adulto Jovem , Adulto , Metacognição/fisiologia , Feminino , MasculinoRESUMO
Intention offloading involves using external reminders such as diaries, to-do lists, and digital alerts to help us remember delayed intentions. Recent studies have provided evidence for various cognitive and metacognitive factors that guide intention offloading, but little research has investigated the physical cost of reminder-setting itself. Here, we present two pre-registered experiments investigating how the cost of physical effort associated with reminder-setting influences strategic intention offloading under different levels of memory load. At all memory loads, reminder-setting was reduced when it was more effortful. The ability to set reminders allowed participants to compensate for the influence of memory load on accuracy in the low-effort condition; this effect was attenuated in the high-effort condition. In addition, there was evidence that participants with less confidence in their memory abilities were more likely to set reminders. Contrary to prediction, physical effort had the greatest effect on reminder-setting at intermediate memory loads. We speculate that the physical costs of reminder-setting might have the greatest impact when participants are uncertain about their strategy choice. These results demonstrate the importance of physical effort as one of the factors relevant to cost-benefit decision-making about cognitive offloading strategies.
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Research into prospective memory suggests that older adults may face particular difficulties remembering delayed intentions. One way to mitigate these difficulties is by using external reminders but relatively little is known about age-related differences in such cognitive offloading strategies. We examined younger and older adults' (N = 88) performance on a memory task where they chose between remembering delayed intentions with internal memory (earning maximum reward per item) or external reminders (earning a reduced reward). This allowed us to distinguish (a) the absolute number of reminders used versus (b) the proreminder or antireminder bias, compared with each individual's optimal strategy. Older adults used more reminders overall, as might be expected, because they also had poorer memory performance. However, when compared against the optimal strategy weighing the costs versus benefits of reminders, it was only the younger adults who had a proreminder bias. Younger adults overestimated the benefit of reminders, whereas older adults underestimated it. Therefore, even when aging is associated with increased use of external memory aids overall, it can also be associated with reduced preference for external memory support, relative to the objective need for such support. This age-related difference may be driven at least in part by metacognitive processes, suggesting that metacognitive interventions could lead to improved use of cognitive tools. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).
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Memória Episódica , Metacognição , Humanos , Idoso , Envelhecimento/psicologia , Cognição , Rememoração Mental , IntençãoRESUMO
Perceivers can use past experiences to make sense of ambiguous sensory signals. However, this may be inappropriate when the world changes and past experiences no longer predict what the future holds. Optimal learning models propose that observers decide whether to stick with or update their predictions by tracking the uncertainty or "precision" of their expectations. However, contrasting theories of prediction have argued that we are prone to misestimate uncertainty-leading to stubborn predictions that are difficult to dislodge. To compare these possibilities, we had participants learn novel perceptual predictions before using fMRI to record visual brain activity when predictive contingencies were disrupted-meaning that previously "expected" events became objectively improbable. Multivariate pattern analyses revealed that expected events continued to be decoded with greater fidelity from primary visual cortex, despite marked changes in the statistical structure of the environment, which rendered these expectations no longer valid. These results suggest that our perceptual systems do indeed form stubborn predictions even from short periods of learning-and more generally suggest that top-down expectations have the potential to help or hinder perceptual inference in bounded minds like ours.
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Aprendizagem , Córtex Visual Primário , Humanos , Imageamento por Ressonância MagnéticaRESUMO
Individuals have the option of remembering delayed intentions by storing them in internal memory or offloading them to an external store such as a diary or smartphone alert. How do we route intentions to the appropriate store, and what are the consequences of this? We report three experiments (two preregistered) investigating the role of value. In Experiment 1, participants preferentially offloaded high-value intentions to the external environment. This improved memory for both high- and low-value content. Experiment 2 replicated the low-value memory enhancement even when only high-value intentions were offloaded. This provides evidence for a cognitive spillover effect: When high-value content is offloaded, internal memory becomes reallocated to low-value content instead. Experiment 3 confirmed a theoretical prediction of this account: participants had superior memory for low- than high-value content when the external store was removed. These results imply that value-based offloading can lead to a cognitive spillover effect from high- to low-value content, similar to the automatic allocation of "spare" capacity that has been proposed in the domain of visual attention. Individuals prioritize high-value information for external memory; consequently, they can be left with predominantly low-value information if it fails. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).
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Encéfalo , Intenção , Humanos , Rememoração MentalRESUMO
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. 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 offloading'. 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 fulfil 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 intention offloading 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.
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Memória Episódica , Metacognição , Serviços Terceirizados , Humanos , Intenção , Encéfalo , Rememoração MentalRESUMO
Nowadays individuals can readily set reminders to offload intentions onto external resources, such as smartphone alerts, rather than using internal memory. Individuals tend to be biased, setting more reminders than would be optimal. We address the question whether the reminder bias depends on offloading scenarios being framed as either gains or losses, both between-participants (Experiment 1) and within-participants (Experiment 2). In both experiments, framing of reminders in terms of gains resulted in participants employing a risk-averse strategy and using more reminders than would be optimal. Importantly, however, participants used reminders more optimally and were more willing to choose the risk-seeking option of remembering internally when reminders implied a loss. Based on metacognitive measures in Experiment 2, the reminder bias increased the more underconfident participants were about their memory abilities in both framing scenarios. Framing did not alter this relationship between erroneous metacognitive underconfidence and reminder bias but provides an additional influence. We conclude that emphasizing the losses (costs) associated with external reminders helps in achieving more optimal decisions in offloading situations, and that in addition to cognitive effort and metacognitive judgments, framing needs to be considered in improving individuals' offloading behavior.
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Metacognição , Humanos , Intenção , Julgamento , Rememoração MentalRESUMO
Metacognition describes the process of monitoring one's own mental states, often for the purpose of cognitive control. Previous research has investigated how metacognitive signals are generated (metacognitive monitoring), for example, when people (both female/male) judge their confidence in their decisions and memories. Research has also investigated how metacognitive signals are used to influence behavior (metacognitive control), for example, setting a reminder (i.e., cognitive offloading) for something you are not confident you will remember. However, the mapping between metacognitive monitoring and metacognitive control needs further study on a neural level. We used fMRI to investigate a delayed-intentions task with a reminder element, allowing human participants to use their metacognitive insight to engage metacognitive control. Using multivariate pattern analysis, we found that we could separately decode both monitoring and control, and, to a lesser extent, cross-classify between them. Therefore, brain patterns associated with monitoring and control are partially, but not fully, overlapping.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Models of metacognition commonly distinguish between monitoring (how metacognition is formed) and control (how metacognition is used for behavioral regulation). Research into these facets of metacognition has often happened in isolation. Here, we provide a study which directly investigates the mapping between metacognitive monitoring and metacognitive control at a neural level. We applied multivariate pattern analysis to fMRI data from a novel task in which participants separately rated their confidence (metacognitive monitoring) and how much they would like to use a reminder (metacognitive control). We find support for the notion that the two aspects of metacognition overlap partially but not fully. We argue that future research should focus on how different metacognitive signals are selected for control.
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Metacognição , Feminino , Humanos , Intenção , Imageamento por Ressonância Magnética , Masculino , Rememoração Mental , Metacognição/fisiologiaRESUMO
Research suggests that individuals with lower working memory have difficulty remembering to fulfil delayed intentions. The current study examined whether the ability to offload intentions onto the environment mitigated these deficits. Participants (N = 268) completed three versions of a delayed intention task with and without the use of reminders, along with three measures of working memory capacity. Results showed that individuals with higher working memory fulfilled more intentions when having to rely on their own memory, but this difference was eliminated when offloading was permitted. Individuals with lower working memory chose to offload more often, suggesting that they were less willing to engage in effortful maintenance of internal representations when given the option. Working memory was not associated with metacognitive confidence or optimal offloading choices based on point value. These findings suggest offloading may help circumvent capacity limitations associated with maintaining and remembering delayed intentions.
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Memória Episódica , Metacognição , Humanos , Individualidade , Intenção , Memória de Curto Prazo , Rememoração MentalRESUMO
The cognitive load of many everyday life tasks exceeds known limitations of short-term memory. One strategy to compensate for information overload is cognitive offloading which refers to the externalization of cognitive processes such as reminder setting instead of memorizing. There appears to be remarkable variance in offloading behavior between participants which poses the question whether there is a common factor influencing offloading behavior across different tasks tackling short-term memory processes. To pursue this question, we studied individual differences in offloading behavior between two well-established offloading paradigms: the intention offloading task which tackles memory for intentions and the pattern copy task which tackles continuous short-term memory load. Our study also included an unrelated task measuring short-term memory capacity. Each participant completed all tasks twice on two consecutive days in order to obtain reliability scores. Despite high reliability scores, individual differences in offloading behavior were uncorrelated between the two offloading tasks. In both tasks, however, individual differences in offloading behavior were correlated with the individual differences in an unrelated short-term memory task. Our results therefore show that offloading behavior cannot simply be explained in terms of a single common factor driving offloading behavior across tasks. We discuss the implications of this finding for future research investigating the interrelations of offloading behavior across different tasks.
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Intenção , Memória de Curto Prazo , Cognição , Humanos , Individualidade , Rememoração Mental , Reprodutibilidade dos TestesRESUMO
Previous research has shown that older adults can have difficulty remembering to fulfill delayed intentions. In the present study, we explored whether age differences in prospective memory are affected when participants are permitted to set reminders to help them remember. Furthermore, we examined whether metacognition can influence the use of such strategies and help older adults compensate for age-related memory decline. In this pre-registered study (N = 88) we administered a computerized task requiring a sample of older (aged 65-84) and younger (aged 18-30) participants to remember delayed intentions for a brief period, manipulating the possibility of setting reminders to create an external cue. Performance of the older group was significantly poorer than the younger group. Moreover, older adults were overconfident in their memory abilities and did not fully compensate for impaired performance, even when strategic reminder setting was permitted. These findings suggest that older adults possess limited metacognitive knowledge about their prospective memory limits and may not fully utilize cognitive offloading strategies to compensate for memory decline. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).
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Envelhecimento/psicologia , Metacognição/fisiologia , Sistemas de Alerta , Adolescente , Adulto , Idoso , Idoso de 80 Anos ou mais , Feminino , Humanos , Masculino , Memória Episódica , Adulto JovemRESUMO
Setting external reminders provides a convenient way to reduce cognitive demand and ensure accurate retrieval of information for prospective tasks. Recent experimental evidence has demonstrated that the decision to offload cognitive information to external resources is guided by metacognitive belief, that is, individuals' confidence in their unaided ability. Other work has also suggested a relationship between metacognitive belief and trait anxiety. In the present study (N = 300), we bridged these two areas by investigating whether trait anxiety correlated with metacognitive belief and-consequently-propensity to offload information in a delayed intentions paradigm. Participants received a financial reward based on their ability to remember targets. However, participants could take a reduced reward per target if they decided to use reminders. We replicated previous findings that participants were biased to use more reminders than would be optimal, and this bias was correlated with metacognitive judgements. However, we show no evidence that trait anxiety held a relationship with metacognitive belief or reminder usage. Indeed, Bayesian analyses strongly favoured the null. Therefore, variation in self-reported trait anxiety does not necessarily influence confidence and strategy when participants remember delayed intentions.
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Memória Episódica , Metacognição , Ansiedade , Teorema de Bayes , Humanos , Intenção , Estudos ProspectivosRESUMO
People often use external reminders to help remember delayed intentions. This is a form of "cognitive offloading". Individuals sometimes offload more often than would be optimal (Gilbert et al., 2020). This bias has been linked to participants' erroneous metacognitive underconfidence in their memory abilities. However, underconfidence is unlikely to fully explain the bias. An additional, previously-untested factor that may contribute to the offloading bias is a preference to avoid cognitive effort associated with remembering internally. The present Registered Report examined evidence for this hypothesis. One group of participants received payment contingent on their performance of the task (hypothesised to increase cognitive effort, and therefore reduce the bias towards offloading); another group received a flat payment for taking part, as in the earlier experiment. The offloading bias was significantly reduced (but not eliminated) in the rewarded group, suggesting that a preference to avoid cognitive effort influences cognitive offloading.
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Memória Episódica , Metacognição , Humanos , Intenção , Rememoração Mental , RecompensaRESUMO
Individuals often choose between remembering information using their own memory ability versus using external resources to reduce cognitive demand (i.e. 'cognitive offloading'). For example, to remember a future appointment an individual could choose to set a smartphone reminder or depend on their unaided memory ability. Previous studies investigating strategic reminder setting found that participants set more reminders than would be optimal, and this bias towards reminder-setting was predicted by metacognitive underconfidence in unaided memory ability. Due to the link between underconfidence in memory ability and excessive reminder setting, the aim of the current study was to investigate whether metacognitive training is an effective intervention to a) improve metacognitive judgment accuracy, and b) reduce bias in strategic offloading behaviour. Participants either received metacognitive training which involved making performance predictions and receiving feedback on judgment accuracy, or were part of a control group. As predicted, metacognitive training increased judgment accuracy: participants in the control group were significantly underconfident in their memory ability, whereas the experimental group showed no significant metacognitive bias. However, contrary to predictions, both experimental and control groups were significantly biased toward reminder-setting, and did not differ significantly. Therefore, reducing metacognitive bias was not sufficient to eliminate the bias towards reminders. We suggest that the reminder bias likely results in part from erroneous metacognitive evaluations, but that other factors such as a preference to avoid cognitive effort may also be relevant. Finding interventions to mitigate these factors could improve the adaptive use of external resources.
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Educação , Metacognição , Adulto , Idoso , Feminino , Humanos , Masculino , Memória Episódica , Rememoração Mental , Pessoa de Meia-Idade , Sistemas de Alerta , Autoavaliação (Psicologia) , Adulto JovemRESUMO
Previous research has shown that short-term fasting in healthy individuals is associated with changes in risky decision-making. The current experiment was designed to examine the influence of short-term fasting in healthy individuals on four types of impulsivity: reflection impulsivity, risky decision-making, delay aversion, and action inhibition. Participants were tested twice, once when fasted for 20 h, and once when satiated. Participants demonstrated impaired action inhibition when fasted; committing significantly more errors of commission during a food-related Affective Shifting Task. Participants also displayed decreased reflection impulsivity when fasted, opening significantly more boxes during the Information Sampling Task (IST). There were no significant differences in performance between fasted and satiated sessions for risky decision-making or delay aversion. These findings may have implications for understanding eating disorders such as Bulimia Nervosa (BN). Although BN has been characterized as a disorder of poor impulse control, inconsistent findings when comparing individuals with BN and healthy individuals on behavioral measures of impulsivity question this characterization. Since individuals with BN undergo periods of short-term fasting, the inconsistent findings could be due to differences in the levels of satiation of participants. The current results indicate that fasting can selectively influence performance on the IST, a measure of impulsivity previously studied in BN. However, the results from the IST were contrary to the original hypothesis and should be replicated before specific conclusions can be made.
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From maps sketched in sand to supercomputing software, humans ubiquitously enhance cognitive performance by creating and using artifacts that bear mental load [1-5]. This extension of information processing into the environment has taken center stage in debates about the nature of cognition in humans and other animals [6-9]. How does the human mind acquire such strategies? In two experiments, we investigated the developmental origins of cognitive offloading in 150 children aged between 4 and 11 years. We created a memory task in which children were required to recall the location of hidden targets. In one experiment, participants were provided with a pre-specified cognitive offloading opportunity: an option to mark the target locations with tokens during the hiding period. Even 4-year-old children quickly adopted this external strategy and, in line with a metacognitive account, children across ages offloaded more often when the task was more difficult. In a second experiment, we provided children with the means to devise their own cognitive offloading strategy. Very few younger children spontaneously devised a solution, but by ages 10 and 11, nearly all did so. In a follow-up test phase, a simple prompt greatly increased the rate at which the younger children devised an offloading strategy. These findings suggest that sensitivity to the difficulties of thinking arises early in development and improves throughout the early school years, with children learning to modify the world around them to compensate for their cognitive limits.
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Cognição/fisiologia , Aprendizagem/fisiologia , Rememoração Mental/fisiologia , Desempenho Psicomotor , Tempo de Reação/fisiologia , Criança , Pré-Escolar , Feminino , Humanos , MasculinoRESUMO
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.