2011-07-18 10:11:48
By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News
Computers and the internet are changing the nature of our memory, research in
the journal Science suggests.
Psychology experiments showed that people presented with difficult questions
began to think of computers.
When participants knew that facts would be available on a computer later, they
had poor recall of answers but enhanced recall of where they were stored.
The researchers say the internet acts as a "transactive memory" that we depend
upon to remember for us.
Lead author Betsy Sparrow of Columbia University said that transactive memory
"is an idea that there are external memory sources - really storage places that
exist in other people".
"There are people who are experts in certain things and we allow them to be,
[to] make them responsible for certain kinds of information," she explained to
BBC News.
Co-author of the paper Daniel Wegner, now at Harvard University, first proposed
the transactive memory concept in a book chapter titled Cognitive
Interdependence in Close Relationships, finding that long-term couples relied
on each other to act as one another's memory banks.
"I really think the internet has become a form of this transactive memory, and
I wanted to test it," said Dr Sparrow.
Where, not what
The first part of the team's research was to test whether subjects were
"primed" to think about computers and the internet when presented with
difficult questions. To do that, the team used what is known as a modified
Stroop test.
The standard Stroop test measures how long it takes a participant to read a
colour word when the word itself is a different colour - for example, the word
"green" written in blue.
Start Quote
I don't think Google is making us stupid - we're just changing the way that
we're remembering things
Dr Betsy Sparrow Columbia University
Reaction times increase when, instead of colour words, participants are asked
to read words about topics they may already be thinking about.
In this way the team showed that, after presenting subjects with tough true/
false questions, reaction times to internet-related terms were markedly longer,
suggesting that when participants did not know the answer, they were already
considering the idea of obtaining it using a computer.
A more telling experiment provided a stream of facts to participants, with half
told to file them away in a number of "folders" on a computer, and half told
that the facts would be erased.
When asked to remember the facts, those who knew the information would not be
available later performed significantly better than those who filed the
information away.
But those who expected the information would be available were remarkably good
at remembering in which folder they had stored the information.
"This suggests that for the things we can find online, we tend keep it online
as far as memory is concerned - we keep it externally stored," Dr Sparrow said.
She explained that the propensity of participants to remember the location of
the information, rather than the information itself, is a sign that people are
not becoming less able to remember things, but simply organising vast amounts
of available information in a more accessible way.
"I don't think Google is making us stupid - we're just changing the way that
we're remembering things... If you can find stuff online even while you're
walking down the street these days, then the skill to have, the thing to
remember, is where to go to find the information. It's just like it would be
with people - the skill to have is to remember who to go see about [particular
topics]."