Metacognition guides intention offloading and fulfillment of real-world plans.

Abstract

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. Public Significance StatementWe show that having low confidence in one's memory ability predicts the use of reminders for everyday intentions. We also show that high confidence can predict worse performance. This can be explained by a failure to set reminders when people are confident.