Forgetting one's own routine: Forgetting in habitual prospective memory

Prospective memory (PM) is the ability to remember to perform a previously formed intention at the appropriate occasion. When these actions involve routine-like everyday tasks, such as remembering to take medication every morning or brushing our teeth several times a day, they are referred to as habitual prospective memory. Individuals are more likely to forget about completing an action if that action is something that they do regularly/habitual action (e.g. forgetting about turning the gas off when you leave the house, and double checking). Therefore participants make more repetition errors on habitual tasks, presumably because of the way we encode information. The current study investigated the processes responsible for these increases in PM errors (e.g. taking the same pill twice) in a habitual task.