Your Beliefs About How Your Memory Works Is a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

Did you forget to pick up the milk?!

We often curse our lack of recalling what we just heard, such as forgetting one of the items that a significant other told us to pick up at the grocery store. While our memory is crucial to the equation, so is our expectation about our memory. In the situation of the forgotten milk, we didn't write down the grocery items to buy because we wrongly assumed we would remember everything to buy. We overestimated our recall ability--falling for an illusion of how we remember.

A new study by researchers from The Conversation looked into how our expectations as to what we'll remember impacts what we in fact recall. In particular, the researchers examined how subtle changes in delivery such as sound and font size may cause people to overestimate or underestimate their recall abilities. The researchers found that people tend to use a combination of ease-of-processing and their beliefs about memory when making recall predictions.

This is the study of what is referred to as metamemory illusions--the situations that impact our beliefs about the future memory of something. Seeing words in a large font or hearing them at a loud volume are common illusions--many people assume that the volume or font size will improve their recall, when in fact it may have little impact (our beliefs about memory). Likewise, when we actually hear words at a loud volume or read text at a large font size, we may assume that we'll remember it better (ease of processing).