Search engines replacing our memory
Google effect It's official. The internet has become part of our extended intelligence, and we are coming to depend on it.
For most of us, the answer to just about anything is a few keystrokes away.
Now psychologists in the US have provided evidence that our minds have become primed to look at the internet when we want to find the answer to a question.
They've also shown that we are much better at remembering where we might find a piece of information, than remembering the information itself.
A group of Harvard university students, with no access to the internet, were given trivia questions to answer with either 'yes' or 'no'. A difficult question might be "Is an ostrich's eye bigger than its brain?"
The study then used a trick much beloved of psychologists, called the Stroop effect.
Immediately after the trivia questions, the students were shown words coloured either red or blue and had to name the colour of the word. The extremely short time it took them to name the colour was measured.
If the coloured word has recently been thought about by the person or is important to them, then it interferes with processing the colour and the time taken is slightly longer.
The researchers included words like 'Yahoo' and 'Google' in their Stroop test and found processing of these words was slower than other words, such as consumer brand names, particularly for students given difficult trivia questions.
They conclude that thoughts of 'googling' were in the students' minds while they tried to answer the questions.
"When people don't know the answers to questions, they automatically think of the internet as the place to find the answers", she says.
Not quite total recall
In a second experiment, participants were given a list of 40 trivia statements and asked to type them into a computer. Half were told the information would be saved, while the other half were told it would be deleted.
After completing the typing task, all participants were instructed to write down as many trivia statements as they could recall.
The researchers found those participants who were told that what they typed would be erased recalled significantly more statements than those who weren't.
"Participants apparently did not make the effort to remember when they thought they could later look up trivia statements they had read," they write.
Sparrow thinks that the internet is being used as a form of 'transactive memory system' - a store of information outside our own brain, which we can access.
In a separate experiment, Sparrow showed that people are much better at remembering the computer folder where a piece of trivia information has been stored than the information itself.
"This is preliminary evidence that when people expect information to remain continuously available, such as we expect with internet access, we are more likely to remember where to find it than we are to remember the details of an item," she says.
Sparrow sees parallels with older transactive memory systems such as books, files and other people's memories.
"I asked my husband [a baseball fan] the other day who was the last person to have 3000 hits in baseball, and now I can't remember who it was. I can always ask him again."