The claimed matter provides systems and/or techniques that develop or use predictive models of human forgetting to effectuate automated reminding. The system includes the use of predictive models that infer the probability that aspects of items will be forgotten, models that evaluate the relevance of recalling aspects of items in different settings, based on contextual information related to user attributes associated with the items, and models of the context-sensitive cost of interrupting users with reminders. The system can combine the probability of users forgetting aspects of an item with an assessed cost of forgetting those aspects to ascertain expected costs for not being reminded about events, compare expected costs for not being reminded with expected costs for interrupting users, and based on comparisons between expected costs for being reminded and expected costs for interrupting users regarding events, generate and deliver reminder notifications to users about items.