Sam J. Gilbert's research while affiliated with University College London and other places

... Such compensation strategies may be especially useful in naturalistic PM tasks (Maylor, 2018;Tomaszewski Farias et al., 2018;Rummel et al., 2019), and thereby also possibly contribute to the age-prospective memory paradox, as older adults might be more accustomed to using them than younger adults (Aronov et al., 2015). Indeed, when they are given the opportunity older adults seem to rely more on intention offloading, the use of physical reminders to reduce the cognitive demand posed by the intention that has to be kept in mind, than younger adults: Older adults set more reminders for future tasks, although not to the extent that it fully compensates for their decline in prospective memory (Scarampi and Gilbert, 2021;Tsai et al., 2022). Still, the use of compensation strategies in general has been demonstrated to be positively related to higher levels of functioning in daily life in older adults (Tomaszewski Farias et al., 2018). ...

... They also examined how such offloading impacts subsequent memory, either with or without access to the external resource. Tsai et al. (2023) explored some telling boundary conditions for the saving enhanced memory effect, which is the finding that saving an initial set of information can enhance the subsequent encoding and recall of a second set of information (Storm & Stone, 2015). Tsai et al.'s studies provide two novel insights into the phenomenon: first, that saving enhanced memory seems to follow similar cognitive mechanisms to the well-studied process of list method directed forgetting. ...

... Based on univariate ERP approaches, they showed mixed findings (Bäß et al., 2008;Hughes & Waszak, 2011;Martikainen et al., 2005;Mifsud et al., 2016). Using MVPA, a few recent studies reported enhanced perception of stimuli induced by active movements (e.g., Yon et al., 2018Yon et al., , 2023, but no literature has directly used MVPA to examine motor-preparatory EEGs. Thus, due to a lack of directly comparable previous literature, we refrain from hypothesising the direction of this comparison. ...

... Some smartphone applications may help in decreasing cognitive load through certain tools and applications (i.e., writing down tasks in a list using a smartphone, smartphone calendar reminders for appointments, registering contacts' phone numbers) [95], allowing for said cognitive space to be used for other purposes. In one study, participants were able to more accurately complete a task by using smartphones to help record and remember parts of the task [105], but when smartphones were taken away in a subsequent task, participants fared worse than when they had not depended on a smartphone originally. Smartphones can also have specific applications geared toward training better cognitive function effectively, especially for the elderly [106]. ...

... Other latest work is related with (i) cognitive offloading is useful for older adults (Burnett & Richmond, 2023) (ii) full offloading is more useful than partial offloading . Not only this, framing is key to offloading behaviour (Fröscher et al., 2022). Sometimes aging can also be associated with reduced choice for offloading behaviour (Tsai et al., 2022). ...

... can be particularly burdensome when these thoughts become ruminative (Beaty et al., 2019;Miranda et al., 2017Miranda et al., , 2023. To reduce these demands while improving goal completion, intentions can be offloaded onto the environment (e.g., setting an electronic calendar reminder; for reviews, see Risko & Gilbert, 2016;Gilbert et al., 2023). But what becomes of the fate of these offloaded memory representations during the retention interval? ...

... A follow-up study by Tsai et al. (2022) used the optimal reminders paradigm introduced by Gilbert et al. (2020) to investigate the bias towards or away from reminders, relative to the optimal strategy (see Optimality of intention offloading above). Older adults performed significantly worse when using unaided memory. ...

... However, while predictive cancellation has seemed foundational to successful theories of action control and awareness, research in recent years has begun to undermine the idea that predicted action outcomes really are cancelled. An emerging body of work has begun to show thatcontrary to classic ideasexpected action outcomes may be perceptually and neurally enhanced Dogge, Custers, Gayet, et al., 2019;Guo & Song, 2019;Paraskevoudi & SanMiguel, 2021;Reznik et al., 2014Reznik et al., , 2021Reznik & Mukamel, 2019;Thomas et al., 2022;Yon et al., 2018Yon et al., , 2021Yon et al., , 2022; see also Hudson et al., 2015Hudson et al., , 2018. These findings accord with a general picture of perceptual prediction described by Bayesian models which stress that it is adaptive for agents to bias their perceptual inferences towards what they expect, perhaps via increasing the gain on expected sensory channels (Bar, 2004;Yuille & Kersten, 2006;Press et al., 2020a). ...

... Adding to the complexity of the summarized results, other studies have shown that individual differences in memory can also affect offloading behavior. It was demonstrated that people with a lower working memory capacity choose to offload more information (Ball et al., 2022;Gilbert, 2015;Meyerhoff et al., 2021;Risko & Dunn, 2015; but see also Morrison & Richmond, 2020). ...

... These results are consistent with recent studies that showed that making a system more "explainable", i.e., making it less opaque (via a bonus or confidence in its decision), benefits to the SoA of participants interacting with it 13 . Our results further suggest that the confidence communicated by the assistance system can be used by the participant as a metacognitive signal to adjust the amount of resources to invest in the current task (metacognitive control 40 ). ...