A paper calendar stuck to the refrigerator door is reminiscent of an outdated practice from bygone days, since in an age of smartphones, common applications, smart speakers, and digital notifications, it might be redundant to write down dates and appointments on paper. However, psychologists see this phenomenon from an altogether different angle.
What appears to be a routine family activity is nothing more than one of the ways cognitive psychologists have been working for many years: the use of environmental cues to compensate for memory deficits. Instead of relying on their memory, people prefer to leave information outside themselves by transforming their homes into memory helpers.
The brain is not built to remember every future task
A number of obligations that individuals have on a daily basis require them to use what psychologists call prospective memory, which involves remembering to perform an intended action at the right time. For example, appointments, picking children from school, paying bills, taking medications, celebrating birthdays, and conducting certain repetitive actions are examples of such tasks that depend on prospective memory. A review on this topic in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science concluded that problems with this type of memory usually arise not from the loss of information, but from the absence of appropriate cues to carry out intended actions.
