The current study examined whether offloading prospective memory (PM) demands onto the environment through the use of reminders eliminates PM differences typically seen between individuals that have poor or good working memory ability. Over two laboratory sessions scheduled one week apart, participants completed three versions of a PM offloading task with and without the use of reminders, along with multiple measures of working memory. Participants also generated a list of naturalistic intentions to fulfill between sessions and were given an intention to email the experimenter every day. They later indicated which intentions were completed with and without the use of reminders. Consistent with prior research, high working memory participants did better in both laboratory and naturalistic settings when having to rely on their own memory. Critically, however, working memory ability was no longer predictive of performance with the use of reminders. Participants with lower working memory also offloaded more often that high ability participants, but this was not optimally calibrated to actual PM performance. These findings suggest that offloading may be particularly beneficial for those with poor cognitive ability. The theoretical and applied ramifications of these findings are discussed.

Monitoring the environment for target events that trigger prospective memory (PM) retrieval requires cognitive resources, reflected by costs to ongoing task performance (i.e., worse accuracy and/or slower response times). Strategic monitoring refers to the use of context to engage or disengage monitoring when a PM target is anticipated or unanticipated. Laboratory strategic monitoring studies have found mixed results as to whether context awareness improves PM performance. The present study employed a meta-analytic technique to assess the overall effect of context awareness on PM performance and ongoing task metrics of strategic monitoring. Overall, context awareness improved PM performance when the target was anticipated and improved ongoing task performance (speed and accuracy) when the target was not anticipated. Moderator analyses revealed the degree of slowing in anticipated contexts predicted how much context awareness improved PM performance. However, the benefits to PM performance from context awareness differed by the type of procedure used. PM performance was improved when context changes could be predicted during blocked or proximity procedures, but not when context varied randomly in trial-level procedures. These results provide insights into the mechanisms underlying strategic monitoring and guidance for researchers on which procedures to be use depending on the theory-driven questions.

Recent evidence suggests that offloading demands on to external sources can improve the remembering of future plans (i.e., prospective memory). The purpose of the current study was to better understand the mechanisms by which participants choose to offload prospective memory demands. Participants formed the intention to later respond to either one (low load) or four (high load) prospective memory targets with or without the use of reminders. During reminder trials, participants could press the “reminder” key to be shown the learned targets in a “lookup table”. The frequency of reminder checking was used to index the willingness to rely on external sources to support remembering. The utility of reminder checking was manipulated by varying the number of distractors presented in the lookup table (Experiment 1), implementing a time penalty for checking the table (Experiment 2), and explicitly describing the effectiveness of using reminders (Experiment 3). The results consistently showed that participants checked reminders more frequently under high memory load (i.e., 4 targets). Moreover, participants checked reminders less frequently when the costs associated with doing so increased (Experiments 2 and 3). However, underconfidence in one’s own memory ability was not associated with checking frequency. These findings suggest that participants choose to offload to reduce the time or effort to complete the task rather than to compensate for poor subjective memory ability.

Offloading (e.g., using Google calendar reminders) has been shown to improve prospective memory (PM). One unstudied aspect of PM offloading is whether having reminders reduces our future-oriented thinking about PM intentions in contexts in which the intention cannot be fulfilled. In the current study, participants were given two blocks of an ongoing lexical decision task. Prior to beginning the task, participants formed an intention to make a special response to PM targets only in block 2. Participants in the reminder condition had the PM intention displayed at the top of the screen in block 2, whereas those in the no-reminder condition did not. To assess activation of the intention out of context, PM lures (Experiment 1) or thought probes (Experiments 2 and 3) were presented in block 1. Results showed that reminders improved PM performance in block 2 but did not reduce lure interference or PM-related thoughts in block 1. These findings suggest that offloaded memory representations remain as activated and accessible as non-offloaded representations outside the context in which intentions can be fulfilled.

The current study tested the idea that expecting a reminder reduces unaided prospective memory (PM) retrieval by reducing encoding effort (i.e., encoding effort hypothesis) and over-reliance on reminders reduces internal memory ability (i.e., use-it-or-lose-it hypothesis). To test this idea, participants completed four PM task blocks. Two reminder conditions had reminders for the first three blocks, but not on the fourth. Critically, the non-expecting reminder condition was told they would not have a reminder prior to encoding targets in the fourth block, while the expecting reminder condition was told they would have a reminder. A no reminder control never had a reminder. The encoding effort hypothesis was supported by showing that expecting a reminder in the fourth block reduced unaided PM retrieval and retrospective memory target recognition (Experiments 1 and 2), while deep processing at encoding negated these effects (Experiment 3). The use-it-or-lose-it hypothesis was not supported, as memory in the fourth block was similar between the non-expecting reminder and no reminder conditions. Our results suggest expecting a reminder reduces encoding effort, which negatively impacts PM when reminders are unavailable. We propose the PM Effort Monitoring and Control Framework to describe how experiencing the effectiveness of retrieval with reminders with low effort (blocks 1-3) leads to a less effortful encoding strategy when they expect another reminder during a subsequent PM task (block 4).