The present study examined individual differences in everyday retrospective memory failures. Undergraduate
students completed various cognitive ability measures in the laboratory and recorded everyday
retrospective memory failures in a diary over the course of a week. The majority of memory failures were
forgetting information pertaining to exams and homework, forgetting names, and forgetting login and
ID information. Using latent variable techniques the results also suggested that individual differences in
working memory capacity and retrospective memory were related to some but not all everyday memory
failures. Furthermore, everyday memory failures predicted SAT scores and partially accounted for
the relation between cognitive abilities and SAT scores. These results provide important evidence for
individual differences in everyday retrospective memory failures as well as important evidence for the
ecological validity of laboratory measures of working memory capacity and retrospective memory.