Every day we have to remember things we want to do in the future: either buy milk when we return home from work, return a book to the library next week or take a pill every day at 8 in the morning. Psychologists call this type of memory "prospective memory." This type of memory is not reliable and is responsible for 50-80% of our daily memory problems. To compensate, many times we set reminders based on lists or alarms.
Young children can be very forgetful and no matter how much we insist on making them understand that they are going to forget things, they almost never try to compensate for the weakness of their memory on their own. You may need to remind them to make the bed before leaving home, for example, or to finish math homework before going to class.
Children do not develop the ability to compensate for memory errors until they get older, and until they finish primary school they do not begin to establish visual clues as reminders strategically if they know that they are likely to forget something.
In a recent study that we have carried out among children aged seven and 13, we asked them to play a video game in which they had to remember one or three actions that they were going to have to do in the future. Then we gave them the option of putting reminders if they wanted to.
When we asked the children how they thought they were going to be given the game, children of all ages recognized that the outcome would be worse the more future actions they had to remember. Not surprisingly, since a previous study had already shown that even children as young as three years old know that longer lists are harder to remember than shorter lists.
However, the surprising thing was that only older children (from nine years of age) were given more reminders if they knew that their memory would fail them.
One of the conclusions is that if you ask a young child to do several things, he will have trouble differentiating for what things he needs a reminder and what things he will not have trouble remembering.
Like adults, children can also put reminders to not forget what they have to do.The results are similar to those of another study that shows that Children do not begin to compensate for their foreseeable memory errors until they are nine or ten years old. Although six or seven-year-olds can distinguish between easy and hard-to-remember things in a memory test, it is not until they are nine or ten years old that they begin to put more effort into difficult things than easy things to remember.
There seems to be an important disconnect between what young children know about their cognitive limitations and what they do about it to mitigate the impact of these limitations.
All these results suggest that if you simply tell your children that their memory will fail them (notifying them that they may forget to bring home a letter from school, for example) it is unlikely that they will remember it better. Even younger children are very likely to be aware that their memory fails them.
So instead of insisting younger children not to "forget things" and rely on the power of their developing memory, try to "take away" as much work as possible in this regard.
One way to do it is creating several external reminders that activate your memory when you need it. Putting a homework schedule on your bedroom door, for example, lessens the burden of having to remember it for themselves.
As soon as the child can prepare the backpack for class by himself, if we put important objects in key places (such as textbooks near the entrance door) he can activate his intention to put them in the backpack.
Lately psychologists have turned their attention to the different ways in which children and adults can use the external environment in a similar way to "unload" cognitive work and help them strengthen their performance. Making lists, creating schedules and putting objects to remember in sight are some examples.
Young children, who often forget many things, might be the ones who benefit most from these strategies If we help them learn to use them.
Authors: Adam Bulley, PhD student in Psychology, University of Queensland, Jonathan Redshaw, Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Queensland and Sam Gilbert, researcher of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, UCL.
This article has originally been published in The Conversation. You can read the original article here.
Translated by Silvestre Urbón.
