Your Memory Strategies Could Impede Your Ability to Remember

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In the arena of cognitive psychology, scientists typically devise laboratory tasks that have little to do with everyday life in order to test a theoretical model. Findings from such experiments help drive understanding of how cognition and memory work but often have little application to real life.

Chris Hertzog, a geropsychologist at Georgia Tech, has taken a different approach by creating a program grounded in real-world activities that aims to directly help people improve their everyday memory. He and his colleagues have determined that the first step is to understand that some beliefs and current memory strategies may be the biggest impediments to remembering things in everyday life.

Memory impediments and how to combat them

These beliefs and strategies can act as memory impediments:

• Relying on habits and routines is not a surefire method for remembering things, especially when something throws your routine off.
• The use of external aids may not be as helpful as you think. For example, making a grocery list is great, but not if you forget the list at home.
• Assuming that important things will be effortlessly remembered.
• Negative beliefs about aging and memory inhibit the implementation of successful strategies and efforts.

Hertzog and Ann Pearman developed the everyday memory and metacognition intervention (EMMI) program to combat these impediments. EMMI uses a personalized approach that aims to optimize an individual’s current routines, habits, and memory strategies. To address the potential memory impediments listed above, EMMI emphasizes two core approaches: mindful self-management and behavioral shaping.

Mindful self-management: EMMI deploys mindful self-regulation techniques to either supplement or supplant unhelpful habits or routines. One important self-management tactic is a Stop, Think, Plan, and Act process. Hertzog describes it this way: “Thinking about and anticipating about where I’m going, what I’m doing, what the demands are going to be, and preparing for them. In other words, a very sort of cognitively proactive approach to managing yourself where you anticipate that there are going to be demands on your mind and your memory and other cognitive functions and that you’ve got to be prepared for them.” Then, you should stop and reflect at key moments about your goals and what comes next in achieving them.

Behavioral shaping: As we all know, changing a well-honed habit, also referred to as behavioral shaping, is very challenging and takes sustained practice. EMMI helps change or supplement habits with a three-phase approach. First, the staff conducts a detailed interview to understand a person’s current habits and routines. Next, individuals undergo three days of group learning activities on topics ranging from how to change negative beliefs about aging, to simple memory strategies, to how to implement these strategies in a variety of everyday occurrences. The third phase occurs over several weeks, in which individuals complete a daily diary of their memory successes and failures. Staff regularly check in with participants to see how they are doing, provide positive reinforcement when desired memory behavior occurred, and constructive review on ways to change behavior when it didn’t.

Memory strategies

The key memory strategies emphasized in EMMI are mindful attention, spaced retrieval, self-testing, and the implementation of an action plan.

• Mindful attention helps to solidify information for easier memory retrieval; for example, paying attention to where you park your car at the airport will increase your chances of remembering where your car is when you return.
• Spaced retrieval is particularly helpful for older adults. It entails repeating the desired information several times, with increasing time between each retrieval. If you are having a conversation with a relative and they mention the name of their new grandchild, you would mindfully attend to the name and silently repeat the name to yourself a few times immediately after the conversation. You would then repeat the name a few hours later, then the next day, and then a few days later.
• Self-testing: Just like the flash card method some of us used to study for school tests, this method works by testing yourself on which information you already know and which you still need to learn or memorize. Self-testing comes in handy for remembering items on a list, in case you happen to forget the list.
• Implementing an action plan: A recent study found that simply stating an “ if-then, I will… “statement significantly improved older adults’ prospective memories of the intended events.

Source: Kamran Aydinov/Freepik

Does EMMI work?

Another unusual aspect of EMMI is how they test for success. Unlike a standard memory training program in which people are tested on things such as lists of random words, EMMI’s marker of success is the proportion of an individual’s memory strategy successes as detailed in their daily diaries. Thus, it’s directly related to real-world memory experiences. Findings from a study testing the efficacy of EMMI are promising. EMMI participants reported greater self-efficacy towards their memory management than they had at the beginning of the program, and their daily diary recordings showed a greater proportion of memory successes than the control group.

What you can do on your own

What’s great about the EMMI program is that you can do some of the core elements on your own. Hertzog recommends “that people start by assuming there are things they can do to compensate for any age-related cognitive decline, that simple procedures like spaced retrieval are highly effective if you actually use them. Just telling them about Stop/Think/Plan/Act seemed to encourage our participants, with little additional training, to use the approach, and they reported encouraging benefits during training group discussions.”