If pant-wetting were a sport, the recent study on how memory adjusts to the constant availability of online information would have launched the damp drawers Olympics.
If you want a good write-up of the study you couldn’t do better than checking out the post on Not Exactly Rocket Science which captures the dry undies fact that although the online availability of the information reduced memory for content, it improved memory for its location.
Conversely, when participants knew that the information was not available online, memory for content improved. In other words, the brain is adjusting memory to make information retrieval more efficient depending on the context.
Think of working in a team where the knowledge is shared across members. Effectively, transactive memory is a form of social memory where each individual is adjusting how much they need to personally remember based on knowledge of other people’s expertise.
This new study, by a group of researchers led by the wonderfully named Betsy Sparrow, found that we treat online information in a similar way.
What this does not show is that information technology is somehow ‘damaging’ our memory, as the participants remembered the location of the information much better when they thought it would be digitally available.
It does, however, raise the interesting question of our relationship to technology and particularly its impact on performance in different contexts.
For example, people making life or death decisions may train using computers but may have to work without them. This transition usually takes place during the student years.
So how can we promote content memory for important information? Probably something old-fashioned like exams.
Link to excellent write-up of study on Not Exactly Rocket Science.