Absent-mindedness

Absent-mindedness can refer to three very different things: 1) a low level of attention ("blanking" or “zoning out”); 2) intense attention to a single object of focus (hyperfocus) that makes us oblivious to events around us (See absent-minded professor); or 3) unwarranted distraction of attention from the object of focus by irrelevant thoughts or environmental events.

Consequences
Lapses of attention are clearly a part of everyone’s life. Some are merely inconvenient, such as missing a familiar turn-off on the highway, and some are extremely serious, such as failures of attention that cause accidents, injury, and loss of life. Beyond the obvious costs of accidents arising from lapses in attention there is lost time, efficiency, personal productivity, and quality of life in the lapse and recapture of awareness and attention to everyday tasks. Individuals for whom intervals between lapses are very short are typically viewed as impaired. Given the prevalence of attentional failures in everyday life and the ubiquitous and sometimes disastrous consequences of such failures, it is rather surprising that relatively little work has been done to directly measure individual differences in everyday errors arising from propensities for failures of attention.

Memory Aspects
Absent-mindedness is related to memory failures. For example, Schachter treats absent-mindedness as one of the seven sins of memory created by Daniel Schacter. It is specifically under the subcategory, sin of omission. Absent-mindedness is simply a failure in attention, involving an overlap between both attention and memory in both the encoding and retrieval stage of memory. Absent-minded memory failures occur when one is distracted with issues or concerns, and he/she is unable to focus on things needed to remember. For example, Schacter exemplified the conditions of misplacing one's keys or glasses. It is clear, however, even from this brief description, that the primary problem in absent-mindedness is one of attention. Recent research has reported that attention lapses may be direct causes of both memory failures as well as action slips.

Early Studies
An early investigator of this topic, Reason employed several diary studies to collect descriptions of action slips as they occurred in their daily lives. Based on these reports, Reason created a classification scheme for everyday failures. Most generally, Reason distinguished between errors based on mistakes in planning and those based on lapses in the course of execution. In the first case, errors arise from lack of knowledge, or inadequate or incorrect information (ignorance or misunderstanding), or from the misapplication of rules, or simply failure to implement them (i.e., faulty or absence inferences from available (correct) information). These sorts of errors will most likely occur in unfamiliar domains or problematic situations. Errors of the second type (i.e., those arising during execution), which are most relevant to absent-mindedness, tend to occur during highly practiced routine actions. There is, however, in such cases, an unexpected and apparently arbitrary departure from the normal smooth flow of action when events unfold in a manner inconsistent with plans. Reason labelled these rather succinctly as “actions not as planned.” Although the effects of absent-mindedness are more often annoying than serious have arisen from errors of attention, perception, memory, action execution or some combination of these factors. More recent work has turned to the world wide web to sample a broader array of everyday errors caused by absent-mindedness.