Haven’t we all used smartphones, laptops, and notebooks to write down to-be-remembered materials? If you have used your calendar to remember appointments, made a grocery list before going to the market, taken notes during a lecture to refer to later, or stored contacts in your phone, you have used cognitive offloading as a strategy in your daily life.
Risko and Gilbert (2016) defined cognitive offloading as the use of physical action so that one can alter the information processing requirements of a task and consequently reduce cognitive demand. That is, we manipulate our body as well as the objects in the environment to increase our cognitive ability or the skills involved in carrying out simple and complex tasks. For example, sometimes we physically tilt our head to normalize the orientation of a rotated stimulus to see the picture in the correct orientation. This phenomenon is known as external normalization.
Offloading improves our perception, memory, arithmetic, counting, and spatial reasoning. When the offloaded material is not available at the time it is needed, it leads to memory impairment. However, when it is available for later use, it leads to performance benefits.
On the positive end, cognitive offloading performs certain functions like reducing cognitive demand, improving performance and also, reducing the demand on our internal storage. We rely on our memory not only to remember past information, but also to remember the behaviors that need to be executed by us in the future. This ability to remember delayed intentions is known as prospective memory. If, for example, we need to remember that we have an appointment for next week and thus, we keep a reminder on our phone so that we do not forget about it. This technique of creating external triggers for delayed intentions is called intention offloading. Individuals offload intentions to external sources when there is an increase on their memory load or when an individual encounters interruption. Some of the benefits of intention offloading to external sources are that the information is available for a longer period of time and unless changed by us, the material is less prone to distortion than the material that is stored internally.
As cognitive offloading has shown to affect one’s memory, the notion of transactive memory system (a way in which individuals in a group encode, store and retrieve to-be-remembered information) has been expanded to the human-technology memory system. In simple words, instead of sharing and remembering information in a group, we use computers and the internet for it. Thus, offloading from transactive memory, requires an individual to change their memory from “what” the information is to “where” it is. For example, offloading the information of a meeting file onto your computer does not need one to remember the contents of the file, but the location of it.
Many studies have shown the cost of offloading information on our cognition. Research has shown that offloading navigation to GPS devices has demonstrated to impair spatial memory of individuals. Using cameras to capture pictures impairs the memory of photographed objects. Research has concluded that information that is offloaded to an external source is spontaneously deprioritized and thus, not remembered.
Offloading has shown to have subtle effects on metacognition (awareness and understanding of our thought process) as well. The metacognitive framework describes two or more ways to achieve a goal, one of which involves cognitive offloading and the other does not. Offloading is a type of strategy to achieve a cognitive goal. When we need to remember a piece of information, our knowledge regarding our previous success with internal (like, metacognitive confidence) and external storage, our beliefs about the reliability of a particular external store, and a feeling of fluency might influence whether an individual stores that information internally or offloads it onto an external source. For example, we evaluate our internal spatial memory as well as the GPS system when deciding how to navigate a friend’s house. If we successfully use the GPS system, we may believe that it is more reliable than our internal store.
In a study, researchers investigated participants’ ability to remember delayed intentions in a task that allowed the possibility of setting external reminders. They found that participants set reminders both when explicitly instructed and when they generated this strategy themselves. Both these types of offloading were moderated by an individual’s metacognition; more specifically, how confident they felt in their own memory performance. In both the conditions, when people felt less confident, they were more likely to set reminders, independent of their actual ability.
A recent study examined the serial position effects (tendency to recall the first and the last few items in a list the best) for offloaded information to understand if offloading reflects the recall pattern of intentional forgetting. The results of the study showed that both offloading and being instructed to forget lead to a decrease in primacy effect (remembering words in the beginning). This suggests that an individual usually encodes information to the extent that it is recorded properly into an external store, but does not exert more effort to remember what the information is. However, the recency effect (remembering words in the end) was intact for the participants when offloading was available. This suggests that the encoding of the to-be-offloaded information is in an active state in memory to produce a recency effect. Rehearsing beginning-of-list items has shown to hinder encoding of end-of-list items. Individuals who offload information do not rehearse it, suggesting a greater memory for end-of-list items during offloading. For example, if an individual is given a list of 40 vegetables to remember, they would remember only the last 10 vegetables (recency effect) and not the others when given an opportunity to offload.
As seen above, considering that the offloaded information is forgotten, a study has also shown that using cognitive offloading can make us more prone to memory manipulation. Researchers conducted three experiments in which individuals performed a memory task where they could offload the to-be-recalled information to an external store but, during the critical trial, the researchers manipulated the information in that store. It was found that the participants rarely noticed the manipulation. Along with that, the participants had created a false memory of the information that was manipulated. These results highlight the vulnerability of our memory to be prone to manipulation when information is offloaded to external sources.
Human cognition has its limits and thus, cognitive offloading helps us to overcome our cognitive limitations, minimize error, and achieve cognitive feats. For example, individuals with an impairment in cognitive ability or brain injury can benefit from cognitive offloading. On the other hand, relying too much on offloading affects our memory and other cognitive abilities. Thus, cognitive offloading increases our performance only when used aptly.
Nikita Mehta
