Strategic reminder setting for time-based intentions: Influence of metacognition, delay length, and cue visibility

Time-based intentions, such as remembering to make a telephone call at a particular time or removing food from the oven after a delay, can be highly cognitively demanding. In everyday life, people often offload these demands to the external environment by setting alerts and reminders; however, this process of time-based intention offloading has rarely been examined experimentally. Here, we investigated this process in a paradigm where participants had to remember to press a key after a 10, 20, or 30 s delay, while simultaneously engaged in an ongoing two-back working memory task. Use of reminders improved accuracy, and participants were more likely to offload intentions at longer delays. This process was driven at least partially by metacognitive beliefs about the need for reminders, rather than the actual need. There was also an influence of time-monitoring demands: offloading was reduced when a clock was always visible, compared with a condition where participants had to press a button to reveal it. These results show that principles of cognitive offloading established in other domains also apply to time-based prospective memory: it improves performance, is influenced by cognitive demand, and guided by metacognitive beliefs.