Why do we fail to follow through on our daily plans – and is forgetting really to blame? This project looks at the everyday forces that come between an intention and its accomplishment, and asks how they work together rather than in isolation.
Prospective Memory (PM) – our ability to remember to carry out future intentions such as attending an appointment, taking medication, or replying to a friend – is essential for managing daily life. Yet everyday life rarely isolates memory from everything happening around it: intentions compete with shifting priorities, boredom, procrastination, stress, and a limited amount of time and attention. Most laboratory research examines these influences one at a time, which leaves open how they combine when people are simply trying to get through their day. This project line takes a multifactorial approach to PM, using smartphone-based experience sampling to follow people as they go about their everyday lives.
Across several studies, this approach is tracing PM failures back to a range of sources. Motivational and emotional factors turn out to matter more than expected: intentions perceived as boring are more likely to be postponed, and this postponement – rather than boredom itself – is what undermines completion. Zooming out further, most unfulfilled intentions are not forgotten at all: only a small share of non-fulfillments (roughly 10-14%) can be attributed to memory failure, with changing priorities, lack of time, and low motivation accounting for the rest. Situational demand shape PM as well, and not in a uniform way: momentary stress and busyness affect different types of everyday intentions differently, and these effects also shift with age.
Taken together, these first findings paint a picture of everyday remembering as something shaped less by memory capacity and more by the emotional, motivational, and situational context surrounding an intention. Building on this, our ongoing work turns to a piece that ties these threads together: how people actually use reminders, how emotional states shape whether and how reminders are used, and what this means for real-world memory performance. Rather than treating reminders as a simple fix for a memory problem, we are interested in reminder use itself as a behavior shaped by the same emotional and motivational dynamics already identified – with the aim of informing more realistic, person-centered support for managing everyday intentions.
