How Absent-Minded Are You?
Lost keys, forgotten names and the reason you walked into the room
Everybody forgets things, but not everybody forgets the same things. Some people never lose a key and cannot hold a name for ten seconds; others remember every name and put the milk in the cupboard. Since the early 1980s psychologists have measured these everyday slips with a short questionnaire, and later analyses found they fall into a few separate kinds. This test shows which kinds are yours.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
Think of the last six months of ordinary days, not of one exceptionally bad week.
What it measures
How often you make four kinds of everyday slip: forgetting plans and where you put things, losing your focus, doing the wrong action on autopilot, and losing names and words. It counts actual lapses, which makes it different from our mindfulness test, which looks at how you pay attention by choice, and from boredom proneness.
Based on: Cognitive Failures Questionnaire (Broadbent, Cooper, FitzGerald & Parkes, 1982), four-factor structure (Wallace, Kass & Stanny, 2002)
Possible results
Everyday memory
How often plans, errands and the whereabouts of things slip your mind.
Distractibility
How easily your attention drifts from what you are reading, hearing or doing.
Blunders
How often your hands run on autopilot and do the wrong thing.
Names and words
How often names and familiar words refuse to come when you need them.
Common questions
Does being absent-minded mean I am less intelligent?
No. The questionnaire was built to count slips in routine moments, when habit is running the show and attention is elsewhere, not to measure reasoning. In the original study the scores were stable over time and matched what spouses said about the person, so the slips are real - but they are about how attention is spent, not about how well you think.
Are absent-minded people more affected by stress?
That was the original researchers' conclusion. Scores behaved like a stable trait and did not rise after stressful life events, but people with many slips who went on to work in a stressful job reported more strain later, while those in calmer jobs did not. The slips looked like a vulnerability rather than a result of stress - a reason to build lists, routines and margins into busy periods.
Is absent-mindedness the opposite of mindfulness?
They are related but not opposites. Mindfulness describes an attitude - paying deliberate, non-judgemental attention to the present - while this test simply counts how often attention fails in daily life. Someone can practise mindfulness and still lose names, and someone who never meditates can make very few slips. Our separate mindfulness test covers the attitude.
Sources
- Broadbent, D. E., Cooper, P. F., FitzGerald, P., & Parkes, K. R. (1982). The Cognitive Failures Questionnaire (CFQ) and its correlates. British Journal of Clinical Psychology. doi:10.1111/j.2044-8260.1982.tb01421.x
- Wallace, J. C., Kass, S. J., & Stanny, C. J. (2002). The Cognitive Failures Questionnaire revisited: Dimensions and correlates. The Journal of General Psychology. doi:10.1080/00221300209602098
An honest note The items are Quinthea's own wording, adapted from the Cognitive Failures Questionnaire, so scores cannot be compared with its published norms. The four groupings follow one later analysis; other studies split the questionnaire differently, and many use a single total. It measures everyday slips, not memory or brain health, and a self-report depends partly on how much you notice your own slips. If forgetfulness is new, getting worse or worrying the people close to you, talk to a doctor.
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