Tsai Pei-Chun, Gilbert Sam J
Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, London, UK.
Mem Cognit. 2025 Apr 16. doi: 10.3758/s13421-025-01708-x.
Time-based intentions, such as remembering to make a telephone call at a particular time or removing food from the oven after a delay, can be highly cognitively demanding. In everyday life, people often offload these demands to the external environment by setting alerts and reminders; however, this process of time-based intention offloading has rarely been examined experimentally. Here, we investigated this process in a paradigm where participants had to remember to press a key after a 10, 20, or 30 s delay, while simultaneously engaged in an ongoing two-back working memory task. Use of reminders improved accuracy, and participants were more likely to offload intentions at longer delays. This process was driven at least partially by metacognitive beliefs about the need for reminders, rather than the actual need. There was also an influence of time-monitoring demands: offloading was reduced when a clock was always visible, compared with a condition where participants had to press a button to reveal it. These results show that principles of cognitive offloading established in other domains also apply to time-based prospective memory: it improves performance, is influenced by cognitive demand, and guided by metacognitive beliefs.
基于时间的意图，比如记得在特定时间打电话或者在一段时间后从烤箱中取出食物，可能在认知上要求很高。在日常生活中，人们常常通过设置提醒来将这些要求转移到外部环境中；然而，这种基于时间的意图卸载过程很少通过实验进行研究。在这里，我们在一个范式中研究了这个过程，在该范式中，参与者必须在延迟10秒、20秒或30秒后记得按下一个按键，同时还要进行一个持续的双任务工作记忆任务。使用提醒提高了准确性，并且参与者在更长的延迟时间更有可能卸载意图。这个过程至少部分是由关于提醒必要性的元认知信念驱动的，而不是实际需求。时间监测需求也有影响：与参与者必须按下按钮才能显示时钟的情况相比，当时钟始终可见时，卸载减少了。这些结果表明，在其他领域确立的认知卸载原则也适用于基于时间的前瞻记忆：它提高了表现，受认知需求影响，并由元认知信念指导。
