ABSTRACT
We often notice how our memory works when it fails us. These memory challenges can range from the most common yet mundane (forgetting a name) to the more devastating (forgetting infants in cars). In this chapter, we review why people’s awareness of memory (metamemory) is critical, and how it is sometimes not well-tuned in terms of predicting our own memory successes and follies. We often think we will remember details of things we have seen many times (such as the Apple logo, the American flag, the location of a fire extinguisher, emergency instructions on an airplane, or INSTRUCTIONS IN LARGE LETTERS, secret passwords or where we have hidden a special object), only to realize we don’t quite remember as much as we think we do. People may often show a forgetting bias, where if we forget something, we deem it to be less important, suggesting that how we interact with our memory can guide or bias our judgments of what is important. This awareness of memory success and failure (and anxiety about our memory) may become more acute as we get older, possibly because we have experienced more memory errors, and know what we need to focus on to remember. Noticing what we remember and forget may be the best way to improve memory across the lifespan, if we can use this knowledge to guide future memory efforts in our often-distracted state and world of information.
