They Forgot Their “Baby”?!: Factors That Lead Students to Forget Their Cell Phone

Abstract

Remembering intentions is critical for daily life, yet errors happen surprisingly often, even when there are fatal consequences (e.g., forgetting a baby in a car). To understand how people can forget personally important intentions, we took 192 students’ cell phones while they participated in an unrelated experiment. We examined (a) how often students forgot to retrieve their cell phone when they left the lab compared to an experimenter-relevant task that required returning an activity tracker that we attached to their clothes to “monitor their amount of fidgeting” during the experiment and (b) whether it mattered if the instructions were explicitly encoded or not. Students only forgot the tracker 10%–13% more often than their cell phone, and explicit encoding did not reduce forgetting; neither did longer, more distracting ongoing tasks. Between 60% and 70% of participants said the intention “popped into mind.” We suggest that prospective memory intentions are “autonomically” encoded, yet even explicitly encoded, personally important tasks are forgotten at surprising rates.