Mental Versus Physical Effort: Weighing the Decision to Offload

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D)

Department

Psychology and Special Education

Date of Award

Spring 5-1-2026

Abstract

In recent years, research has shown that individuals often set more reminders to remember delayed intentions than they need, a phenomenon known as reminder bias. The goal of this study is to gain a deeper understanding of factors that contribute to reminder bias, such as the effort involved with the offloading task and the difficulty of to-be-remembered information. Participants studied easy (related), or difficult (unrelated) words pairs to recall on a later test. They completed a series of trials using internal and external strategies. For the internal strategy, they used their memory. For the external strategy, they were able to save the word pairs to review during the recall phase. Additionally, participants were assigned to either a low or high effort offloading task. In the low effort task, they saved word pairs by pressing the “enter” key, but in the high effort offloading condition, they typed a numerical code backwards to save them. When participants could choose their strategy, maximum points were awarded for words recalled using an internal strategy, and fewer points were given for using external strategies. These points were used to calculate actual and optimal indifference points to determine if participants were biased towards setting reminders. While they did show evidence of reminder bias, it was not significantly influenced by the effort of the offloading task. They did, however, have higher actual and optimal indifference point values when the memory task was easy. These findings will contribute to a better understanding of the decision-making processes underlying the use of offloading strategies to optimize memory performance.

Advisor

Lacy Krueger

Subject Categories

Education

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