Absent-Mindedness (Memory)

Absent-mindedness is one of the psychologist Daniel Schacter's seven sins of memory, a failure at the intersection of attention and memory rather than a defect of storage itself. It produces everyday errors such as misplacing keys or eyeglasses or forgetting an appointment, because a person's attention was directed elsewhere at the moment information needed to be encoded or a planned action needed to be carried out. The underlying cause is insufficient attention during encoding, which leaves too weak a memory trace to support later recall of where an item was placed or when an appointment falls, even though the person was capable of forming that memory under fuller attention. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/