The influence of enjoyment on remembering

: an analysis of memory in decision-­making

Abstract

Forgetting is a constant companion in people’s lives. Throughout the day, people face multiple situations in which they need to evaluate whether they will remember to do an activity or not and decide on the usage of memory aids. However, people err in making predictions about their memory which leads to forgetting. To gain a deeper understanding of people’s failure toremember, this work examines influences on an individual’s memory performance with the purpose of understanding how accurately people predict their memory performance. Thus, a study on judgements of learning is conducted with common activities as to­be­remembered items, and it reveals that people overestimate their memory, believing they would remember more than they do. This overconfidence is even more apparent when people are tasked to remember items for five days. Further, influences of enjoyability and indication of external memory aid usage on actual and predicted memory performance is explored, however, no statistical evidence is found. The data suggests that people do not accurately predict their memory, indicating a need for improvements of the evaluation processes people use or higher usage of memory aids. Especially, if items need to be remembered for longer periods, it is recommendable to make use of memory aids to prevent needless forgetting.

Date of Award	25 Jan 2023
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Daniel Fernandes (Supervisor)