Excessive use of reminders: Metacognition and effort-minimisation in cognitive offloading

Shifting reliance between the internal and external world: A meta-analysis on visual-working memory use

Visual working memory (VWM) is a fundamental cognitive capacity that allows us to temporarily hold visual information, but storage is effortful and content-fragile. Rather than loading VWM to the maximum, individuals usually rely on the external world and access information just in time. However, participants do rely on VWM more as access costs to external information increase. This phenomenon is commonly investigated with so-called copy tasks, which differ across paradigms, manipulations, and dependent variables. We here present findings of a meta-analysis into the reliability and consistency of shifts in the assumed trade-off between storing and sampling across manipulations and dependent variables, using data from 28 experiments. We found that all cost manipulations led to substantial shifts from external sampling to storage in VWM. Cost manipulations did not differ in their effect across studies even though such differences are reported within studies. All dependent variables were associated with clear but different strong effects. We argue that the differences observed between indicators are not only due to sensitivity differences but also due to differential aspects of behavior that are measured. New variables and techniques might now pave the way to understanding the trade-off between storing and sampling more in-depth. Collectively, our findings suggest that the reliance on VWM or the external world shifts consistently as access cost is increased, is largely irrespective of cost manipulations, and expresses itself reliably across dependent variables. With this work, we seek to help establish standards and comparability across this growing body of work.

Dyads use heuristics to minimise time costs during joint action

Research on joint action planning has demonstrated that, when acting with others, individuals will choose more effortful actions if it improves co-efficiency by reducing the overall effort exerted by the group. However, because these studies use actions for which time and effort costs are confounded, it is unclear which costs participants sought to minimise and what processes underlie decision-making about individual contributions to joint actions. Across three experiments, we tested (1) whether dyads aim to minimise effort vs. time costs (Experiments 1-2) and (2) whether individuals choose actions based on a rational, deliberative process or a heuristic (Experiment 3). Data from a joint object-dragging computer task revealed that participants chose to drag objects to the closer of two goals even when it required more effort from the dyad (Experiments 1-2). Participants preferred closer goals when time and effort costs were equal (Experiment 3a), but only when the objects' locations were salient (Experiment 3b). Together, these results suggest that: (1) individuals minimise time, rather than effort, when sharing object-moving tasks, and (2) they do so - at least in part - by using distance as a heuristic. Our findings also replicate and extend earlier work showing that people prefer acting together versus alone, even when this is less efficient.

Strategic reminder setting for time-based intentions: Influence of metacognition, delay length, and cue visibility

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.

The development of social offloading

Across two experiments, we explored the conditions under which 4- to 11-year-old children (N = 138) were more likely to seek social cognitive helpers and whether they preferentially relied on help from those that had previously shown proficiency in a relevant cognitive context. Children completed a memory task with varying levels of difficulty, after which they were introduced to two characters that exhibited either a high memory ability (task-relevant) or a high motor skill ability (task-irrelevant) in a distinct context. Children then completed the memory task a second time with the option to choose one of the two characters to assist them. From 6 years of age, children preferentially offloaded memory demand onto the character that had previously demonstrated a high memory ability and were also more likely to ask for help on difficult trials compared with easy trials. Our results also indicated potential differences in factors influencing children's social and nonsocial cognitive offloading decisions.

Can you help me? Using others to offload cognition

One of the most ancient and widely used forms of cognitive offloading is the outsourcing of cognitive operations onto other humans. Here, we explore whether humans preferentially seek out and use information from more competent compared with less competent others in an ongoing cognitive task. Participants (N = 120) completed a novel computerised visuospatial working memory task where each trial required them to remember either one, five, or ten target locations and recall them after a brief delay. Next, participants watched two virtual people compete in a distinct memory game, where one performed relatively well, demonstrating a stronger memory, and the other performed relatively poorly, demonstrating a weaker memory. Finally, participants completed the initial memory task again, but this time, either the strong-memory person or the weak-memory person was available to help with recall on each trial. Our results showed that, through observation and without direct instruction, participants acquired beliefs about the virtual people's cognitive proficiencies and could readily draw upon these beliefs to inform offloading decisions. Participants were typically more likely to ask for help from the strong-memory person, and this tendency was independent from other factors known to drive cognitive offloading more generally, like task difficulty, unaided cognitive ability, and metacognitive confidence.

Differences between children and young adults in the effects of difficulty and value of learning items on cognitive offloading strategies

Cognitive offloading refers to the use of external tools to assist in memory processes.This study investigates the effects of item difficulty and value on cognitive offloading during a word-pair learning task, comparing children and young adults in a context where both cues coexist. In Experiment 1, we examined the impact of difficulty and value cues on cognitive offloading using a 2 (difficulty: easy vs. difficult) × 2 (value: high vs. low) × 2 (age group: children vs. young adults) mixed design.The results indicated that young adults accounted for both difficulty and value cues in their cognitive offloading strategies, in contrast to children, who relied only on difficulty cues. In Experiment 2, we retained the experimental design of Experiment 1, with one notable change: difficulty and value cues were simultaneously displayed on the same interface. This change aimed to reduce working memory load, thereby helping children better perceive the value cues. Our results showed that when value and difficulty cues were presented on the same interface, children took both cues into account in their cognitive offloading decisions. In contrast, young adults were more influenced by the value of the learning items when adopting cognitive offloading strategies. We conducted an exploratory analysis to examine the impact of serial position on offloading decisions. The results showed that children were more likely to use cognitive offloading strategies for items from the early and middle positions than for those from the later positions. In contrast, young adults (as observed in Experiment 2) tended to use cognitive offloading strategies for items from the middle positions. Our findings suggest that age affects the utilization of cues in the strategies of cognitive offloading. We interpreted the observed differences in cognitive offloading strategies through the lens of developmental changes in metacognitive abilities.

Cognitive offloading bias in primary and secondary school students and its relationship with metacognitive monitoring

Individuals often use external aids to assist with information storage, a process known as cognitive offloading. Prior research has indicated that adults sometimes fail to utilize internal and external cognitive resources judiciously, resulting in cognitive offloading bias, which is often linked to metacognition. However, it remains experimentally unverified whether primary and secondary school students exhibit cognitive offloading bias and how this relates to metacognition. This study aimed to address these gaps. In Experiment 1, we examined cognitive offloading bias in primary and secondary school students (aged 7-15 years) using a word-pair memory task. The results revealed that primary school students tended to rely excessively on internal memory in comparison to the optimal strategy, while secondary school students leaned towards an overreliance on external reminders. In Experiment 2, we incorporated metacognitive judgements to explore the relationship between metacognition and cognitive offloading bias. Results indicated that the cognitive offloading bias observed in primary school students was linked to the accuracy of their metacognitive monitoring.

Non-optimal cognitive offloading in schizophrenia in a prospective memory task: Influence of both metacognitive beliefs and cognitive effort avoidance

Cognitive offloading refers to the use of physical action and the external environment to simplify mental demand. One form of this-intention offloading-involves the use of external reminders to support delayed intentions. Both beliefs of poor memory ability and a preference to avoid cognitive effort lead to offloading intentions rather than using internal memory. Schizophrenia is a population with deficits in prospective memory and to overcome this difficulty, neuropsychological interventions can propose external aids such as reminders. However, it is unknown what motivates individuals with schizophrenia to spontaneously use reminders. Twenty-seven individuals with schizophrenia and twenty-seven non-clinical individuals were recruited to perform a prospective memory task, with two levels of difficulty, by deciding whether to use reminders or their internal memory. The proportion of reminder use, performance (hits and errors), subjective effort and metacognitive beliefs were recorded. The results show a non-optimal use of reminders in the schizophrenia group: this group used more reminders than the non-clinical group when the task was easy but did not increase reminder usage when the task became more difficult. Individuals with schizophrenia perceived the task to be more effortful than the non-clinical individuals in the easy task, but also had a high estimation of their memory ability. Reminder usage in schizophrenia is atypical and non-optimal. This may relate to effort and metacognition but the direct influence of these factors remains to be demonstrated. The overall results open perspectives on the neuropsychological treatment of prospective memory in this population.

Intention offloading: Domain-general versus task-specific confidence signals

Intention offloading refers to the use of external reminders to help remember delayed intentions (e.g., setting an alert to help you remember when you need to take your medication). Research has found that metacognitive processes influence offloading such that individual differences in confidence predict individual differences in offloading regardless of objective cognitive ability. The current study investigated the cross-domain organization of this relationship. Participants performed two perceptual discrimination tasks where objective accuracy was equalized using a staircase procedure. In a memory task, two measures of intention offloading were collected, (1) the overall likelihood of setting reminders, and (2) the bias in reminder-setting compared to the optimal strategy. It was found that perceptual confidence was associated with the first measure but not the second. It is shown that this is because individual differences in perceptual confidence capture meaningful differences in objective ability despite the staircase procedure. These findings indicate that intention offloading is influenced by both domain-general and task-specific metacognitive signals. They also show that even when task performance is equalized via staircasing, individual differences in confidence cannot be considered a pure measure of metacognitive bias.

Children's metacognition and cognitive offloading in an immediate memory task

Cognitive offloading is used to supplement internal processing demands through external actions such as writing down information. While metacognition plays a critical role in adults' cognitive offloading decisions, less is known about the relation between metacognition and cognitive offloading in children. Here, we introduced an immediate memory task to 11- to 12-year-olds under two conditions: no choice to offload and choice to offload. Participants made metacognitive judgements about their memory capacity, and the task performance components such as accuracy and effort. Our results revealed that recall accuracy of the to-be-remembered items increased in the choice condition. Interestingly, while there was a consensus amongst participants that they chose to offload to maximise accuracy and reduce effort, there was no relation between offloading behaviour and metacognitions about accuracy and effort. On the other hand, metacognition for memory capacity was related to offloading behaviour. We discuss the implications for further understanding of the relation between cognitive offloading and metacognition in children.

Cognitive offloading is value-based decision making: Modelling cognitive effort and the expected value of memory

How do people decide between maintaining information in short-term memory or offloading it to external reminders? How does this affect subsequent memory? This article presents a simple computational model based on two principles: A) items stored in brain-based memory occupy its limited capacity, generating an opportunity cost; B) reminders incur a small physical-action cost, but capacity is effectively unlimited. These costs are balanced against the value of remembering, which determines the optimal strategy. Simulations reproduce many empirical findings, including: 1) preferential offloading of high-value items; 2) increased offloading at higher memory loads; 3) offloading can cause forgetting of offloaded items ('Google effect') but 4) improved memory for other items ('saving-enhanced memory'); 5) reduced saving-enhanced-memory effect when reminders are unreliable; 6) influence of item-value: people may preferentially offload high-value items and store additional low-value items in brain-based memory; 7) greatest sensitivity to the effort of reminder-setting at intermediate rather than highest/lowest levels of task difficulty; 8) increased offloading in individuals with poorer memory ability. Therefore, value-based decision-making provides a simple unifying account of many cognitive offloading phenomena. These results are consistent with an opportunity-cost model of cognitive effort, which can explain why internal memory feels effortful but reminders do not.

Influence of the physical effort of reminder-setting on strategic offloading of delayed intentions

Intention offloading involves using external reminders such as diaries, to-do lists, and digital alerts to help us remember delayed intentions. Recent studies have provided evidence for various cognitive and metacognitive factors that guide intention offloading, but little research has investigated the physical cost of reminder-setting itself. Here, we present two pre-registered experiments investigating how the cost of physical effort associated with reminder-setting influences strategic intention offloading under different levels of memory load. At all memory loads, reminder-setting was reduced when it was more effortful. The ability to set reminders allowed participants to compensate for the influence of memory load on accuracy in the low-effort condition; this effect was attenuated in the high-effort condition. In addition, there was evidence that participants with less confidence in their memory abilities were more likely to set reminders. Contrary to prediction, physical effort had the greatest effect on reminder-setting at intermediate memory loads. We speculate that the physical costs of reminder-setting might have the greatest impact when participants are uncertain about their strategy choice. These results demonstrate the importance of physical effort as one of the factors relevant to cost-benefit decision-making about cognitive offloading strategies.

Perseveration on cognitive strategies

To acquire and process information, performers can frequently rely on both internal and extended cognitive strategies. However, after becoming acquainted with two strategies, performers in previous studies exhibited a pronounced behavioral preference for just one strategy, which we refer to as perseveration. What is the origin of such perseveration? Previous research suggests that a prime reason for cognitive strategy choice is performance: Perseveration could reflect the preference for a superior strategy as determined by accurately monitoring each strategy's performance. However, following our preregistered hypotheses, we conjectured that perseveration persisted even if the available strategies featured similar performances. Such persisting perseveration could be reasonable if costs related to decision making, performance monitoring, and strategy switching would be additionally taken into account on top of isolated strategy performances. Here, we used a calibration procedure to equalize performances of strategies as far as possible and tested whether perseveration persisted. In Experiment 1, performance adjustment of strategies succeeded in equating accuracy but not speed. Many participants perseverated on the faster strategy. In Experiment 2, calibration succeeded regarding both accuracy and speed. No substantial perseveration was detected, and residual perseveration was conceivably related to metacognitive performance evaluations. We conclude that perseveration on cognitive strategies is frequently rooted in performance: Performers willingly use multiple strategies for the same task if performance differences appear sufficiently small. Surprisingly, other possible reasons for perseveration like effort or switch cost avoidance, mental challenge seeking, satisficing, or episodic retrieval of previous stimulus-strategy-bindings, were less relevant in the present study.

Take a load off: examining partial and complete cognitive offloading of medication information

Although cognitive offloading, or the use of physical action to reduce internal cognitive demands, is a commonly used strategy in everyday life, relatively little is known about the conditions that encourage offloading and the memorial consequences of different offloading strategies for performance. Much of the extant work in this domain has focused on laboratory-based tasks consisting of word lists, letter strings, or numerical stimuli and thus makes little contact with real-world scenarios under which engaging in cognitive offloading might be likely. Accordingly, the current work examines offloading choice behavior and potential benefits afforded by offloading health-related information. Experiment 1 tests for internal memory performance for different pieces of missing medication interaction information. Experiment 2 tests internal memory and offloading under full offloading and partial offloading instructions for interaction outcomes that are relatively low severity (e.g., sweating). Experiment 3 extends Experiment 2 by testing offloading behavior and benefit in low-severity, medium-severity (e.g., backache), and high-severity interaction outcomes (e.g., heart attack). Here, we aimed to elucidate the potential benefits afforded by partial offloading and to examine whether there appears to be a preference for choosing to offload (i) difficult-to-remember information across outcomes that vary in severity, as well as (ii) information from more severe interaction outcomes. Results suggest that partial offloading benefits performance compared to relying on internal memory alone, but full offloading is more beneficial to performance than partial offloading.

Outsourcing Memory to External Tools: A Review of 'Intention Offloading'

How do we remember delayed intentions? Three decades of research into prospective memory have provided insight into the cognitive and neural mechanisms involved in this form of memory. However, we depend on more than just our brains to remember intentions. We also use external props and tools such as calendars and diaries, strategically placed objects, and technologies such as smartphone alerts. This is known as 'intention offloading'. Despite the progress in our understanding of brain-based prospective memory, we know much less about the role of intention offloading in individuals' ability to fulfil delayed intentions. Here, we review recent research into intention offloading, with a particular focus on how individuals decide between storing intentions in internal memory versus external reminders. We also review studies investigating how intention offloading changes across the lifespan and how it relates to underlying brain mechanisms. We conclude that intention offloading is highly effective, experimentally tractable, and guided by metacognitive processes. Individuals have systematic biases in their offloading strategies that are stable over time. Evidence also suggests that individual differences and developmental changes in offloading strategies are driven at least in part by metacognitive processes. Therefore, metacognitive interventions could play an important role in promoting individuals' adaptive use of cognitive tools.

Framing cognitive offloading in terms of gains or losses: achieving a more optimal use of reminders

Nowadays individuals can readily set reminders to offload intentions onto external resources, such as smartphone alerts, rather than using internal memory. Individuals tend to be biased, setting more reminders than would be optimal. We address the question whether the reminder bias depends on offloading scenarios being framed as either gains or losses, both between-participants (Experiment 1) and within-participants (Experiment 2). In both experiments, framing of reminders in terms of gains resulted in participants employing a risk-averse strategy and using more reminders than would be optimal. Importantly, however, participants used reminders more optimally and were more willing to choose the risk-seeking option of remembering internally when reminders implied a loss. Based on metacognitive measures in Experiment 2, the reminder bias increased the more underconfident participants were about their memory abilities in both framing scenarios. Framing did not alter this relationship between erroneous metacognitive underconfidence and reminder bias but provides an additional influence. We conclude that emphasizing the losses (costs) associated with external reminders helps in achieving more optimal decisions in offloading situations, and that in addition to cognitive effort and metacognitive judgments, framing needs to be considered in improving individuals’ offloading behavior.

Study effort and the memory cost of external store availability

Previous work demonstrates that individuals often recall less information if, at study, there is expectation that an external memory store will be available at test. One explanation for this effect is that when individuals can expect access to an external memory store, they forgo intentional, controlled efforts at encoding. The present work offers a novel test of this account by examining study effort, indexed by study time and self-reported strategy use, as a function of instructed external store availability. In two preregistered experiments, participants studied lists of to-be-remembered items for a free recall test and were either instructed that they could use their study list to support them at test or that they could not. Critically, participants controlled their own study time, and no participant had their study list at test, regardless of instruction. Consistent with the effort at encoding account, external store availability influenced both study time and strategy use, and there was evidence that these effects mediated the influence of external store availability on recall performance. Interestingly, much of the memory cost remained when controlling for study effort, thus, suggesting that the cost is potentially multiply determined.

Individual differences in working memory capacity predict benefits to memory from intention offloading

Research suggests that individuals with lower working memory have difficulty remembering to fulfil delayed intentions. The current study examined whether the ability to offload intentions onto the environment mitigated these deficits. Participants (N = 268) completed three versions of a delayed intention task with and without the use of reminders, along with three measures of working memory capacity. Results showed that individuals with higher working memory fulfilled more intentions when having to rely on their own memory, but this difference was eliminated when offloading was permitted. Individuals with lower working memory chose to offload more often, suggesting that they were less willing to engage in effortful maintenance of internal representations when given the option. Working memory was not associated with metacognitive confidence or optimal offloading choices based on point value. These findings suggest offloading may help circumvent capacity limitations associated with maintaining and remembering delayed intentions.

Individual differences in cognitive offloading: a comparison of intention offloading, pattern copy, and short-term memory capacity

The cognitive load of many everyday life tasks exceeds known limitations of short-term memory. One strategy to compensate for information overload is cognitive offloading which refers to the externalization of cognitive processes such as reminder setting instead of memorizing. There appears to be remarkable variance in offloading behavior between participants which poses the question whether there is a common factor influencing offloading behavior across different tasks tackling short-term memory processes. To pursue this question, we studied individual differences in offloading behavior between two well-established offloading paradigms: the intention offloading task which tackles memory for intentions and the pattern copy task which tackles continuous short-term memory load. Our study also included an unrelated task measuring short-term memory capacity. Each participant completed all tasks twice on two consecutive days in order to obtain reliability scores. Despite high reliability scores, individual differences in offloading behavior were uncorrelated between the two offloading tasks. In both tasks, however, individual differences in offloading behavior were correlated with the individual differences in an unrelated short-term memory task. Our results therefore show that offloading behavior cannot simply be explained in terms of a single common factor driving offloading behavior across tasks. We discuss the implications of this finding for future research investigating the interrelations of offloading behavior across different tasks.

Consequences of cognitive offloading: Boosting performance but diminishing memory

Modern technical tools such as tablets allow for the temporal externalisation of working memory processes (i.e., cognitive offloading). Although such externalisations support immediate performance on different tasks, little is known about potential long-term consequences of offloading behaviour. In the current set of experiments, we studied the relationship between cognitive offloading and subsequent memory for the offloaded information as well as the interplay of this relationship with the goal to acquire new memory representations. Our participants solved the Pattern Copy Task, in which we manipulated the costs of cognitive offloading and the awareness of a subsequent memory test. In Experiment 1 (N = 172), we showed that increasing the costs for offloading induces reduced offloading behaviour. This reduction in offloading came along with lower immediate task performance but more accurate memory in an unexpected test. In Experiment 2 (N = 172), we confirmed these findings and observed that offloading behaviour remained detrimental for subsequent memory performance when participants were aware of the upcoming memory test. Interestingly, Experiment 3 (N = 172) showed that cognitive offloading is not detrimental for long-term memory formation under all circumstances. Those participants who were forced to offload maximally but were aware of the memory test could almost completely counteract the negative impact of offloading on memory. Our experiments highlight the importance of the explicit goal to acquire new memory representations when relying on technical tools as offloading did have detrimental effects on memory without such a goal.

The effect of metacognitive training on confidence and strategic reminder setting

Individuals often choose between remembering information using their own memory ability versus using external resources to reduce cognitive demand (i.e. ‘cognitive offloading’). For example, to remember a future appointment an individual could choose to set a smartphone reminder or depend on their unaided memory ability. Previous studies investigating strategic reminder setting found that participants set more reminders than would be optimal, and this bias towards reminder-setting was predicted by metacognitive underconfidence in unaided memory ability. Due to the link between underconfidence in memory ability and excessive reminder setting, the aim of the current study was to investigate whether metacognitive training is an effective intervention to a) improve metacognitive judgment accuracy, and b) reduce bias in strategic offloading behaviour. Participants either received metacognitive training which involved making performance predictions and receiving feedback on judgment accuracy, or were part of a control group. As predicted, metacognitive training increased judgment accuracy: participants in the control group were significantly underconfident in their memory ability, whereas the experimental group showed no significant metacognitive bias. However, contrary to predictions, both experimental and control groups were significantly biased toward reminder-setting, and did not differ significantly. Therefore, reducing metacognitive bias was not sufficient to eliminate the bias towards reminders. We suggest that the reminder bias likely results in part from erroneous metacognitive evaluations, but that other factors such as a preference to avoid cognitive effort may also be relevant. Finding interventions to mitigate these factors could improve the adaptive use of external resources.