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memory lapses: what makes a person prone to forgetting a child in an overheated car?

researchers have found that without cues to trigger memory, anyone is at risk of suffering from the potentially fatal effects of forgetfulness.

by dave yasvinski

may 25 2023

3 minute read

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women are just as likely as men to have memory errors

women are just as likely to experience memory errors as men. getty

the return of warmer weather renews the risk of every preoccupied parent’s worst nightmare: accidentally forgetting their child inside an overheated vehicle.

nearly 500 children have died of pediatric vehicular heatstroke in the u.s. since 1998, according to noheatstroke.org , because their caregiver didn’t realize they were still in the car. in canada, numbers are harder to come by, but recent research puts this figure at around one child per year since 2013 .

as advocacy groups in the u.s. push congress to enact laws that minimize this risk, by, for example, requiring vehicles to come equipped with preventative safety mechanisms, a team of researchers set out to explore the factors that allow the unthinkable to occur in the first place. their research, which appears in the journal of applied research in memory and cognition , found that such tragedies are caused by a lapse in prospective memory, or the ability to remember critical but routine behaviours throughout the course of the day.

“you process those more automatically, so you can get lost in your thoughts because your behaviours are being driven by the environment,” said nathan rose , the william p. and hazel b. white assistant professor of brain, behaviour and cognition in the university of notre dame’s department of psychology. “it’s not that you forget what it is you’re supposed to be doing; you’re just forgetting to do it at the appropriate moment.”

environmental cues help jog memory

to explore the limits of prospective memory, researchers designed a naturalistic experiment to measure the likelihood of 192 college students accidentally forgetting to retrieve their babies — in this case, their cellphones — following an unrelated experiment. participants were required to hand over their phones upon arrival at the lab and given activity trackers to attach to the back of their waistbands. one group was reminded to return the tracker and ask for their phone back when they were finished, the other was not. at the end of the experiment, participants were debriefed and shown to an exit while researchers secretly waited to see who would leave their phone behind.

the team found that around seven per cent of students forgot to retrieve their phones without being reminded, compared to five per cent who received the reminder. around 18 per cent of all participants failed to return the activity tracker. this led them to conclude that prospective memory errors can occur when environmental cues do not trigger a person’s memory of intention at the right moment. without these cues, anyone is at risk of suffering from the potentially fatal effects of forgetfulness.

according to the team, it is the same phenomenon that causes busy parents to forget they have a baby on board. after all, they point out, children were rarely forgotten in cars before the 1990s, when laws requiring baby seats to be placed rear-facing in the back of vehicles came into force. “the absence of salient visual and auditory cues from a child who is sleeping in the back seat creates a scenario conducive to forgetting the child is in the car,” they wrote.

and, despite what some may think, men women face equal risk of suffering from such lapses. “when you talk about the forgotten baby scenarios, people often make assumptions about who forgets their babies, who the caregivers are,” rose said. “and there’s no evidence to support the idea that men are more likely to commit this kind of error than women, or vice versa.”

the team hopes their research will offer some solace to parents who are still suffering from the consequences of leaving a child behind in untenable temperatures. “this study should help inform the public and judicial system about what does and does not cause such memory errors to happen, even those with tragic consequences.”

dave yasvinski is a writer with  healthing.ca

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dave yasvinski

memory lapses: what makes a person prone to forgetting a child in an overheated car?

researchers have found that without cues to trigger memory, anyone is at risk of suffering from the potentially fatal effects of forgetfulness.

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memory lapses: what makes a person prone to forgetting a child in an overheated car?

researchers have found that without cues to trigger memory, anyone is at risk of suffering from the potentially fatal effects of forgetfulness.

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