People often use external reminders to help remember delayed intentions. This is a form of “cognitive offloading”. Individuals sometimes offload more often than would be optimal (Gilbert et al., 2020). This bias has been linked to participants’ erroneous metacognitive underconfidence in their memory abilities. However, underconfidence is unlikely to fully explain the bias. An additional, previously-untested factor that may contribute to the offloading bias is a preference to avoid cognitive effort associated with remembering internally. The present Registered Report examined evidence for this hypothesis. One group of participants received payment contingent on their performance of the task (hypothesised to increase cognitive effort, and therefore reduce the bias towards offloading); another group received a flat payment for taking part, as in the earlier experiment. The offloading bias was significantly reduced (but not eliminated) in the rewarded group, suggesting that a preference to avoid cognitive effort influences cognitive offloading.

人们经常使用外部提醒来帮助记住延迟的意图。这是“认知卸载”的一种形式。个人有时会比最佳情况更频繁地卸载（Gilbert 等，2020）。这种偏见与参与者对其记忆能力错误的元认知不足有关。然而，信心不足不太可能完全解释这种偏见。另一个可能导致卸载偏差的先前未经测试的因素是偏好避免与内部记忆相关的认知努力。本注册报告审查了这一假设的证据。一组参与者根据他们的任务表现获得报酬（假设会增加认知努力，从而减少对卸载的偏见）；另一组因参加而获得固定报酬，就像之前的实验一样。奖励组的卸载偏差显着减少（但没有消除），这表明避免认知努力的偏好会影响认知卸载。