Final answer:
A person may be referred to as 'absentminded' when experiencing failures in prospective memory, resulting in lapses of memory due to diverted attention or breaks in attention. Other issues like blocking, amnesia, and prosopagnosia also exemplify memory failures, and strategies such as mnemonic devices and adequate sleep can help improve memory.
Step-by-step explanation:
A person may be referred to as 'absentminded' when there is a failure in prospective memory
Prospective memory refers to our ability to remember to perform an action at a specified future point in time. Failures in this type of memory can manifest in several ways, one of which is absentmindedness. This memory failure is characterized by lapses in memory which can occur when our attention breaks or gets diverted to something else. For example, psychology researcher Cynthia experienced absentmindedness when her focus on her sick child caused her to forget whether she had turned in her temporary identification at the court.
Another form of memory issue is blocking, also known as the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon, where information is stored in memory but access to it is temporarily blocked. For example, not remembering the name of a well-known actor such as Morgan Freeman, even though it feels accessible, is an instance of blocking. Other memory issues include amnesia, such as anterograde amnesia, which inhibits new episodic or semantic memories from being formed, and prosopagnosia, a condition that results in the inability to recognize familiar faces.
Daniel Schacter's 'seven sins of memory' highlight the ways in which our memories can fail us, which include forgetting, distortion, and intrusion. In order to minimize the effects of memory failure, strategies like mnemonic devices, rehearsal, self-referencing, and adequate sleep can be employed to enhance memory retention and recall.