I rely on my blog to remember all my stroke thoughts. Friends ask for details on the research I quote and I have to go back to my blog to refresh my memory. Are the memory tests given post-stroke valid anymore?
http://www.alphagalileo.org/ViewItem.aspx?ItemId=167048&CultureCode=en
Our increasing reliance on the Internet and the ease of access to the
vast resource available online is affecting our thought processes for
problem solving, recall and learning. In a new article published in the
journal Memory, researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz
and University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign have found that ‘cognitive
offloading’, or the tendency to rely on things like the Internet as an
aide-mémoire, increases after each use. We might think that memory is
something that happens in the head but increasingly it is becoming
something that happens with the help of agents outside the head.Benjamin
Storm, Sean Stone & Aaron Benjamin conducted experiments to
determine our likelihood to reach for a computer or smartphone to answer
questions. Participants were first divided into two groups to answer
some challenging trivia questions - one group used just their memory,
the other used Google. Participants were then given the option of
answering subsequent easier questions by the method of their choice.
The results revealed that participants who previously used the
Internet to gain information were significantly more likely to revert to
Google for subsequent questions than those who relied on memory.
Participants also spent less time consulting their own memory before
reaching for the Internet; they were not only more likely to do it
again, they were likely to do it much more quickly. Remarkably 30% of
participants who previously consulted the Internet failed to even
attempt to answer a single simple question from memory.
Lead author Dr Benjamin Storm commented, “Memory is changing. Our
research shows that as we use the Internet to support and extend our
memory we become more reliant on it. Whereas before we might have tried
to recall something on our own, now we don't bother. As more information
becomes available via smartphones and other devices, we become
progressively more reliant on it in our daily lives.”
This research suggests that using a certain method for fact finding
has a marked influence on the probability of future repeat behaviour.
Time will tell if this pattern will have any further reaching impacts on
human memory than has our reliance on other information sources.
Certainly the Internet is more comprehensive, dependable and on the
whole faster than the imperfections of human memory, borne out by the
more accurate answers from participants in the internet condition during
this research. With a world of information a Google search away on a
smartphone, the need to remember trivial facts, figures, and numbers is
inevitably becoming less necessary to function in everyday life.
http://newsroom.taylorandfrancisgroup.com/S=cab1064056a90282853372f7a8f295c7173ed04f/news/press-release/cognitive-offloading-how-the-internet-is-increasingly-taking-over-human-mem#.V7LZaHZwbct
No comments:
Post a Comment