The Psychology of Mental Lapses and Everyday Errors

Absent-minded errors appear to have the following characteristics:

• They occur in tasks in which some degree of automaticity has been achieved.
• They are associated with distraction and preoccupation, but not with any other obvious emotional or environmental stress.
• Their occur in familiar and mostly constant environments.
• Many erroneous actions take the form of sequences of behavior that recognizably belong to some other activity, not intended on that occasion.
• People appear to differ characteristically in their liability to these minor slips and lapses.
• This individual liability is not confined to one particular cognitive domain (memory, action, recognition, language etcetera), but appears in all aspects of mental life.
• There are indications that this liability to minor cognitive failure has some relationship to an individual's general vulnerability to stress.

Basic components of the Theory of Action:

1. Memory System.
1. Intention Store.
1. Acts as a kind of temporal extension to the Intention System.
2. Its contents are limited, short-lived, and subject to loss or interference.
2. Action Store.
3. Recognition Store.
4. Word Store.
2. Intention System- it organizes plans of future action, to monitor and guide ongoing activity, to cope with changing circumstances, to review past actions, and to recover errors when they occur.
1. It has limited capacity. Only one plan can be maximally active within this system at any moment.
2. It is always busy, at least during waking hours.

Source: Absent-minded?: The Psychology of Mental Lapses and Everyday Errors (1982) by J. T. Reason and Klara Mycielska.