Forgetfulness, even fatalities, can happen to anyone – ScienceDaily

Featured Sponsor

Store	Link	Sample Product
UK Artful Impressions	Premiere Etsy Store

Advocacy groups have been lobbying Congress to enact laws to help guard against this particular oversight by requiring certain safety devices to be installed in cars. Researchers at the University of Notre Dame set out to understand how and why this type of forgetting is possible.

Nathan Rose, the William P. and Hazel B. White Assistant Professor of Brain, Behavior, and Cognition in the Department of Psychology, set up an experiment to better understand this lapse in what researchers call prospective memory, or the ability to remember critical but routine. behaviors like turning off the oven when you leave the house for the day.

In a study recently published in the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, Rose and PhD candidates Abigail Doolen and Andrea O’Rear devised a naturalistic procedure to measure whether and how college students might forget their cell phones, something most are very attached to and could have dire consequences for them if they forget it Their “babies”, so to speak.

Researchers took the cell phones of 192 Notre Dame students while they were participating in an unrelated experiment and then examined how often the students forgot to retrieve their phone when they left the lab at the end of the experiment, and whether it mattered that they were given information. explicit. reminders to pick up the phone once the experiment was completed.

For the study, students were also given activity trackers to attach to the back of their waistbands. One group was reminded to ask for their cell phone and return the tracker when finished; the other group was not. After the students finished the unrelated experiment, they were briefed and guided to an exit, while the experimenters pretended to go about their business as usual, observing if and when the participants remembered to retrieve their phone or return the tracker.

About 7 percent of the students forgot their cell phones without the reminder, compared with nearly 5 percent of those who did. Almost 18 percent of any of the categories forgot to return the tracker.

The researchers found that forgetfulness occurs when environmental cues fail to trigger the memory of that intention at the right time, and the intention gets lost in the shuffle, Rose said. They also found that potential memory errors can happen to anyone.

“It processes them more automatically, so you can get lost in thought because your behaviors are being driven by the environment,” Rose said. “It’s not that you forget what you’re supposed to do; you just forget to do it at the appropriate time.”

In the same way that students missed environmental cues to remind them to pick up their phone or return the tracker, so too are parents driving to work or running errands with a baby in the back seat, the researchers theorized. Before laws were put in place in the 1990s that required car seats to be placed rear-facing in the back seat, it was uncommon to forget babies in cars. “The absence of prominent visual and auditory cues from a child sleeping in the back seat creates a scenario conducive to forgetting that the child is in the car,” the researchers wrote.

Or, Rose explained, if a parent takes a child in the car but is not usually the caregiver doing that activity, and he or she falls into the routine and established pattern of driving to work, they may forget that the child is still there.

Rose explained that memory errors occur with the same frequency between men and women. “When talking about forgotten baby scenarios, people often make assumptions about who forgets their babies, who are the caregivers,” Rose said. “And there is no evidence to support the idea that men are more likely to make this type of error than women, or vice versa.”

Rose and her co-authors believe this research may have serious implications when it comes to exonerating parents who mistakenly forget to remove their children from car seats, resulting in their deaths. “This study should help inform the public and the judicial system about what causes and does not cause such memory errors,” the researchers wrote, “even those with tragic consequences.”