The forgotten remindings: Personal remindings examined through self-probed retrospection during reading and writing

Remindings are spontaneously arising recollections of past personal experiences that are instrumental in that they occur in response to an ongoing task to which they are perceived as being related. While related areas of research have found the number of off-task thoughts to decrease with the difficulty of the on-going task, task difficulty has yet to be examined in remindings. Here we present a series of studies examining the effects of task difficulty on remindings as well as further examining the phenomenological characteristics of remindings. Experiments 1–3 provide evidence that the frequency of remindings during different types of reading and writing task decreases with increasing difficulty associated with the parallel task. Experiment 4 shows that the content of remindings varies systematically with characteristics of the parallel task, indicating their context dependency and potential instrumentality. Findings are discussed in relation to research on mind wandering and involuntary autobiographical memories.