Your brain forgets things it deems boring: study

It’s common to forget routine tasks such as taking your daily medications or responding to that one email you’ve been meaning to send. In a new study, researchers have discovered why.

Mundane behaviours that are repeated over time and occur in the context of many other similar behaviours can lead people to conflate intentions and behaviours and create false memories of completing the task, said Dolores Albarracin, a professor of psychology and marketing at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

“Intentions and making plans typically improve task execution. We need them to function in society, to realise our goals and get along with others. But when we form an intention at the moment, such as ‘I’m going to sign that form now,’ and it’s an activity we routinely perform, we want to complete the task when we form the intention,” Asian News International quoted her as saying. “Otherwise, we don’t actually sign the form. And the reason why is because the thought of wanting to sign the form can be misremembered as actually having signed it, in which case, we’d be better off not having formed the intention to sign the form in the first place.”

Across five studies, Albarracin and her co-authors investigated the previously unrecognised phenomenon of remembering having enacted a mundane behavioural decision when one only intended to do so, as well as its psychological mechanisms.
Participants chose job candidates and either acted on the decision to hire them, generated an intention to hire them later, or made a judgment that was irrelevant. Following a delay, they were asked to report whether they had acted on the decision or simply intended to do. “If intentions play a causal role in producing misreports of behaviour, misreports should be more common in the intention than the control condition,” Albarracin noted.

The first two experiments showed misreports and subsequent performance errors, even when controlling for guessing. Experiments three and four demonstrated greater confusion when the physical involvement and mental criteria for intention and behaviour were similar. And the fifth experiment indicated that monitoring whether one has acted on a decision is highly effective at reducing errors and more effective than monitoring intention.

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