Reminders can help you remember future tasks, but relying on reminders may also reduce your brain’s ability to learn how to recall on its own, a new study published in the journal Science finds. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition.
Most people use digital reminders every day. Alerts on your smartphone, smartwatch, and calendar can help you remember appointments and deadlines, reducing the mental effort required to track future intentions. Psychologists call this strategy cognitive offloading, or shifting some of the brain’s workload to external assistance. Although previous research has shown that reminders improve immediate performance, little is known about whether reminders affect the ability to remember independently in the future.
The researchers wanted to investigate whether reminders simply provide temporary support, or whether they also change anticipatory memory, the learning process that typically strengthens the ability to remember to perform an intended action later.
A research team led by Craig Ferrers of the University of California, Santa Cruz conducted two online experiments. The first experiment involved 130 undergraduate students and included data from 108 participants after applying predefined exclusion criteria.
Participants simultaneously recalled two prospective memory tasks (e.g., pressing the spacebar when seeing a three-syllable word) while completing an ongoing word task. In one condition, participants used their memory to recall both tasks. In the offload condition, one of the memory tasks was supported by a highly salient reminder that appeared in bold, while the other still had to be remembered internally.
After completing the first phase, all participants repeated the task again, but this time without the reminders, allowing the researchers to examine whether earlier use of reminders affected later memory performance. The researchers then conducted a second experiment with 280 participants using a different version of the task to replicate the results.
As expected, performance improved significantly while reminders were enabled. Participants rarely forgot tasks that were supported by reminders. However, the researchers found no evidence that removing one memory burden could improve performance on another memory task that required participants to remember themselves. In fact, in a second experiment, making reminders more explicit actually worsened performance on the non-offloaded memory task.
The most important finding appeared after the reminder disappeared. Participants who had previously relied on reminders were significantly less likely to remember future tasks than participants who had never used reminders. Their performance was even lower than the baseline level achieved by participants who relied solely on their memory throughout the study. This suggests that they learned less, not just lost the benefit of the reminder.
The authors concluded, “While reminders can be powerful tools for immediate task completion, they are not cognitively neutral. Reminders can undermine the very practice needed to develop durable internal memory skills, suggesting a fundamental trade-off between immediate convenience and long-term learning and skill acquisition.”
This finding is consistent with a broader concept in psychology known as desirable difficulty. Memorizing without assistance is more mentally taxing, but that extra effort can strengthen your memory over time. Removing much of this effort with reminders may prevent people from developing stronger internal memory skills.
The authors caution that because the study was conducted online with university students, the results may not fully reflect how people use reminder apps in their daily lives. For example, older adults may rely on offloading differently than students. The researchers also examined relatively short-term memory performance, but the question remains whether long-term reliance on digital reminders has similar effects.
The study, “Offloading Reduces Future Memory Learning,” was authored by Craig Fellers and Benjamin C. Storm.
