Trait anxiety does not correlate with metacognitive confidence or reminder usage in a delayed intentions task

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.

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.

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.

Anxiety and amygdala connectivity during movie-watching

Rodent and human studies have implicated an amygdala-prefrontal circuit during threat processing. One possibility is that while amygdala activity underlies core features of anxiety (e.g. detection of salient information), prefrontal cortices (i.e. dorsomedial prefrontal/anterior cingulate cortex) entrain its responsiveness. To date, this has been established in tightly controlled paradigms (predominantly using static face perception tasks) but has not been extended to more naturalistic settings. Consequently, using ‘movie fMRI’—in which participants watch ecologically-rich movie stimuli rather than constrained cognitive tasks—we sought to test whether individual differences in anxiety correlate with the degree of face-dependent amygdala-prefrontal coupling in two independent samples. Analyses suggested increased face-dependent superior parietal activation and decreased speech-dependent auditory cortex activation as a function of anxiety. However, we failed to find evidence for anxiety-dependent connectivity, neither in our stimulus-dependent or -independent analyses. Our findings suggest that work using experimentally constrained tasks may not replicate in more ecologically valid settings and, moreover, highlight the importance of testing the generalizability of neuroimaging findings outside of the original context.

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Using ‘movie fMRI’, we tested whether trait anxiety correlates with face-dependent amygdala-prefrontal coupling.

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We observed altered superior parietal activation to faces and auditory cortex activation to speech as a function of anxiety.

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We failed to find evidence for anxiety-dependent amygdala-dmPFC connectivity in stimulus-dependent or -independent analyses.

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Our findings highlight the importance of testing the generalizability of neuroimaging findings outside of the original context.