A new study by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has revealed that people rely more on websites such as Google and wikipedia than their own brain to store information.
In a series of experiments that involved Harvard undergraduates, psychologist Betsy Sparrow found that the results support a growing belief that people are using the Internet as a personal memory bank: the so-called Google effect.
However, Sparrow added that "We’re remarkably efficient," in the ability to find information.
Sparrow says that the new trend could categorised under a concept called transactive memory.
According to the theory, people divide the labour of remembering certain types of shared information. For example, a husband and wife may decide to memorise different things.
Sparrow’s first set of experiments, which involved 106 Harvard undergraduates working on desktop computers, tested whether people thought of the Internet as soon as they were posed true-false questions.
She employed a psychological method called a Stroop task and found that the students relied on the Internet for information and avoided taxing their brains.
Sparrow also found that students were better at remembering where information was stored than the information itself.
In a further set of experiments with 62 Columbia students, Sparrow tested whether that backup memorisation comes at a cost.
Washington University, Missouri, psychologist Roddy Roediger said the study is "convincing," and "there is no doubt that our strategies are shifting in learning."
"Why remember something if I know I can look it up again? In some sense, with Google and other search engines, we can offload some of our memory demands onto machines."
