You were holding the TV remote five minutes ago. Now it has vanished. You check the sofa, lift the cushions, search the coffee table and ask everyone in the house who moved it, only to discover it beside you or in another perfectly ordinary place. The same thing happens with the AC remote tomorrow. If this is a recurring part of your day, it is tempting to conclude that you simply have a terrible memory. Cognitive psychology, however, offers a more interesting explanation. Frequently misplacing everyday objects can involve absent-mindedness, weak memory encoding, divided attention, object-location binding and automatic action. In other words, sometimes you cannot remember where you left the remote because your brain never properly recorded the moment you put it down in the first place.
