UC Santa Cruz

The current research adapted Einstein and McDaniel's (1990) prospective memory (PM)paradigm to explore how people manage multiple memory tasks while offloading some but not others. Participants engaged in an ongoing categorization task while monitoring for two specific PM cues. In an Offload condition, participants offloaded one of the two PM tasks, receiving reminders for that specific cue. In a Dual PM condition, participants remembered both PMs internally. This study aimed to address three specific hypotheses: (1) offloading one PM task would improve performance on a concurrent non-offloaded PM task, (2) offloading PMs is not entirely efficient and would lead to worse performance on non-offloaded PMs compared to a single PM condition, and (3) participants would show worse performance on a PM task when offloading was no longer available due to lack of practice. Performance was measured in terms of PM accuracy, reaction times, and ongoing task performance. We consistently failed to find evidence that offloading one PM led to improved performance on a concurrent non-offloaded PM. In some cases, offloading led to impaired performance on non-offloaded PMs. When participants were later required to perform previously offloaded tasks without reminders, their performance was consistently worse compared to those who had practiced these tasks without offloading. These findings challenge the assumption that offloading simply frees up cognitive resources for reallocation to other tasks and may stem from limited flexibility in PM-related cognitive processes, hidden cognitive costs associated with offloading, or metacognitive illusions. These mechanisms, however, relied on the assumption that remembering 2 PMs requires more cognitive resources than remembering a single PM, and that offloading would reduce cognitive demands. In Experiment 1, however, participants did not perform better when they had a single PM compared to when they remembered two PMs. There may be benefits to remembering two PMs concurrently, possibly due to the increased frequency of cues with the additional PM; if so, offloading may hinder PM Performance. The current research suggests that while reminders improve immediate task completion, they may reduce performance on concurrent PM tasks and circumvent practice effects that strengthen PM learning.