You are already late when the familiar search begins. You check your handbag, empty your pockets, look beside the bed and return to the kitchen counter for the third time. Eventually, the keys appear somewhere embarrassingly ordinary, perhaps underneath yesterday's mail or inside the jacket you were wearing ten minutes ago. People who regularly lose their keys may describe themselves as forgetful, but cognitive psychology offers a more precise possibility. The problem can involve absent-mindedness, weak encoding, divided attention, object-location binding and automatic behavior. In fact, Harvard psychologist Daniel Schacter specifically uses losing keys as an example of absent-mindedness: we sometimes put an object somewhere without paying enough attention for its location to become a useful memory.
