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You have just been prescribed a new course of antibiotics; will you schedule alarms to make sure you take your treatment as you should – three times a day, every day, for the next week? Or will you trust yourself to remember to do so unprompted?
You may find it easy to make this choice, yet it is in fact a rather complex task. Research has shown that the use of reminders (a process known as cognitive offloading) is guided, in part, by how confident we are about our ability to remember. Accurately assessing our own cognitive skills, however, can be shaped by a range of psychological factors. People with high levels of compulsivity, for example, tend to struggle with judging their own abilities. This trait, commonly present in a range of mental health conditions such as obsessive-compulsive disorder, is characterized by repetitive behaviors and intrusive thoughts. Here, Boldt et al. investigate whether differences in compulsivity can impact how and when people choose to set reminders.
To do so, an online study was conducted on 600 adults from the general population. Before completing a highly demanding memory task, participants first answered questionnaires assessing traits including compulsivity and anxiety. They were also asked to predict how well they would perform on the test.
When going through the memory task, participants could choose to use reminders to help themselves at the start of each trial. By doing so, however, they knew they would earn fewer points for each accurate answer given.
The results showed that individuals who scored higher on compulsivity tended to set fewer reminders. This was partly because they were more confident in their memory than other participants, but also because compulsivity itself seemed to directly reduce reminder use.
Taken together, these findings suggest that people who are highly compulsive may not adequately use memory aids even when they might need them. Although none of the participants had a clinical diagnosis, the results could inform future studies of conditions such as obsessive-compulsive disorder, as well as guide the design of interventions to support memory and daily functioning.
