Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips
Contenu
Titre
Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips
Science
Créateur
Betsy Sparrow
Jenny Liu
Daniel M. Wegner
Résumé
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.
volume
333
numéro
6043
pages
776-778
Date
08/05/2011
Titre abrégé
Science
Google Effects on Memory
Langue
en
doi
10.1126/science.1207745
issn
0036-8075, 1095-9203