Everyday Forgetting: Data from a Diary Study
- 1 February 1988
- journal article
- research article
- Published by SAGE Publications in Psychological Reports
- Vol. 62 (1) , 299-303
- https://doi.org/10.2466/pr0.1988.62.1.299
Abstract
50 subjects were asked to keep a diary of instances in which they realized they had forgotten something. The 750 forgettings recorded were grouped on the basis of nominal similarity, with 64% of them falling into one of 24 categories. The major categories included forgetting to comply with requests, failures of habitual actions, absentmindedness, and forgetting to bring something. Most failures involved the forgetting to perform a future action (i.e., forgetting to do something) as opposed to forgetting facts, names, or other information once known. These results suggest that the failure to retrieve the intention to do something at the appropriate time is the source of many forgettings, and this finding may have implications for the construction of memory inventories.This publication has 5 references indexed in Scilit:
- Measurements of everyday memory: Toward the prevention of forgettingBulletin of the Psychonomic Society, 1984
- A “Forgetting Journal” for Memory CoursesTeaching of Psychology, 1984
- Do laboratory tests predict everyday memory? A neuropsychological studyJournal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 1983
- Know thy memory: The use of questionnaires to assess and study memory.Psychological Bulletin, 1982
- Structure and pragmatics of a self-theory of memoryMemory & Cognition, 1981