In my book on remembering what you’re doing and what you intend to do, I briefly discuss the popular strategy of asking someone to remind you (basically, whether it’s an effective strategy depends on several factors, of which the most important is the reliability of the person doing the reminding). So I was interested to see a pilot study investigating the use of this strategy between couples.

The study confirms earlier findings that the extent to which this strategy is effective depends on how reliable the partner's memory is, but expands on that by tying it to age and conversational style.

The study involved 11 married couples, of whom five were middle-aged (average age 52), and six were older adults (average age 73). Participants completed a range of prospective memory tasks by playing the board game "Virtual Week," which encourages verbal interaction among players about completing real life tasks. For each virtual "day" in the game, participants were asked to perform 10 different prospective memory tasks — four that regularly occur (eg, taking medication with breakfast), four that were different each day (eg, purchasing gasoline for the car), and two being time-check tasks that were not based on the activities of the board game (eg, check lung capacity at two specified times).

Overall, the middle-aged group benefited more from collaboration than the older group. But it was also found that those couples who performed best were those who were more supportive and encouraging of each other.

Collaboration in memory tasks is an interesting activity, because it can be both helpful and hindering. Think about how memory works — by association. You start from some point, and if you’re on a good track, more and more should be revealed as each memory triggers another. If another person keeps interrupting your train, you can be derailed. On the other hand, they might help you fill you in gaps that you need, or even point you to the right track, if you’re on the wrong one.

In this small study, it tended to be the middle-aged couples that filled in the gaps more effectively than the older couples. That probably has a lot to do with memory reliability. So it’s not a big surprise (though useful to be aware of). But what I find more interesting (because it’s less obvious, and more importantly, because it’s more under our control) is this idea that our conversational style affects whether memory collaboration is useful or counterproductive. I look forward to results from a larger study.