Envisioning success: a naturalistic investigation into prospective memory performance, reminder use, and memory strategies in an academic context

Prospective memory encompasses the ability to remember to carry out future intentions. Prospective memory performance is essential for students. College students are expected to remember and complete a variety of assignments on a daily basis. In these naturalistic experiments taking place before and after COVID-19, college students were required to set academic goals for themselves for three consecutive days following specific guidelines. Each day, the participant identified a time specific academic goal and a non-time specific academic goal. Participants were randomizing assigned experimental or control condition. The experimental group performed an episodic future thinking exercise during encoding. Additionally, each time students submitted a goal, they also identified how they remembered to complete the goal, either with internal or external reminders. Results showed no significant correlation between episodic future thinking and academic goal performance. However, in both experiments a significant correlation was observed between external reminder use and academic goal completion. Moreover, participants in both experiments completed more non-time specific tasks than time-specific tasks and reported use of both external reminders and internal reminders. Thus, these experiments are suitable for providing evidence for the benefits of cognitive offloading for academic success. They also open a discussion for the effect of modality change on academic goal performance