Google Effects on Memory
Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips
Betsy Sparrow,1* Jenny Liu,2 Daniel M. Wegner3
Department of Psychology, Columbia University, 1190 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, NY 10027, USA. 2Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1202 West Johnson Street, Madison, WI 53706, USA. 3Department of Psychology, Harvard University, 33 Kirkland Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. *To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: sparrow@psych.columbia.edu The advent of the Internet, with sophisticated algorithmic search engines, has made accessing information as easy as lifting a finger. No longer do we have to make costly efforts to find the things we want. We can “Google” the old classmate, find articles online, or look up the actor who was on the tip of our tongue. The results of four studies suggest that when faced with difficult questions, people are primed to think about computers and that when people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it. The Internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves. In a development that would have seemed extraordinary just over a decade ago, many of us have constant access to information. If we need to find out the score of a ballgame, learn how to perform a complicated statistical test, or simply remember the name of the actress in the classic movie we are viewing, we need only turn to our laptops, tablets, or smartphones and we can find the answers immediately. It has become so commonplace to look up the answer to any question the moment it occurs, it can feel like going through withdrawal when we can’t find out something immediately. We are seldom offline unless by choice and it is hard to remember how we found information before the Internet became a ubiquitous presence in our
Betsy Sparrow,1* Jenny Liu,2 Daniel M. Wegner3
Department of Psychology, Columbia University, 1190 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, NY 10027, USA. 2Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1202 West Johnson Street, Madison, WI 53706, USA. 3Department of Psychology, Harvard University, 33 Kirkland Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. *To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: sparrow@psych.columbia.edu The advent of the Internet, with sophisticated algorithmic search engines, has made accessing information as easy as lifting a finger. No longer do we have to make costly efforts to find the things we want. We can “Google” the old classmate, find articles online, or look up the actor who was on the tip of our tongue. The results of four studies suggest that when faced with difficult questions, people are primed to think about computers and that when people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it. The Internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves. In a development that would have seemed extraordinary just over a decade ago, many of us have constant access to information. If we need to find out the score of a ballgame, learn how to perform a complicated statistical test, or simply remember the name of the actress in the classic movie we are viewing, we need only turn to our laptops, tablets, or smartphones and we can find the answers immediately. It has become so commonplace to look up the answer to any question the moment it occurs, it can feel like going through withdrawal when we can’t find out something immediately. We are seldom offline unless by choice and it is hard to remember how we found information before the Internet became a ubiquitous presence in our
References: 10–13 2 May 2011; accepted 27 June 2011 Published online 14 July 2011; 10.1126/science.1207745 Fig 1. Accessibility of brand names (as measured by colornaming reaction time) following blocks of easy or hard test items. Error bars are ±SEM.