Using digital devices, such as smartphones, could help improve memory recollection rather than cause people to become lazy or forgetful, according to a new study led by UCL researchers.
The research — published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology — showed that digital devices help people store and remember very important information.
This, in turn, frees up their memory to recall additional, less important things. Neuroscientists have previously expressed concerns that the overuse of technology could result in the breakdown of cognitive abilities and cause “digital dementia.”
However, the study’s findings show that using a digital device as external memory not only helps people remember the information saved in their devices, but it helps them remember unsaved information as well.
To demonstrate this, researchers developed a task that tests participants’ memories that can be played on a touchscreen digital tablet or computer. The test was undertaken by 158 volunteers aged between 18 and 71.
Participants were shown up to 12 numbered circles on the screen and had to remember to drag some of them to the left and right. The number of circles that they remembered to drag to the correct side determined how much monetary gain they would receive at the end of the experiment.
One side was given a “high value” designation, meaning that remembering to drag a circle to that side was worth 10 times as much money as remembering to drag a circle to the other “low value” side.
Participants performed this task 16 times, half of which they had to rely on their memory recollection skills completely and the other half, they were allowed to set reminders on the digital device.
The results found that participants tended to use the digital devices to store the details of the high-value circles, and that when they did so, their memory for those circles improved by 18%.
Their memory for low-value circles also improved by 27%, even in people who never set any reminders for low-value circles.
However, results also showed a potential cost to using reminders; when they were taken away, participants remembered low-value circles better than high-value ones, showing that they had entrusted the high-value circles to their devices and then forgotten about them.
Senior author Sam Gilbert from the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience said: “We wanted to explore how storing information in a digital device could influence memory abilities.”
“We found that when people were allowed to use an external memory, the device helped them to remember the information they had saved into it. This was hardly surprising, but we also found that the device improved people’s memory for unsaved information as well.”
“This was because using the device shifted the way that people used their memory to store high-value versus low-value information. When people had to remember by themselves, they used their memory capacity to remember the most important information. But when they could use the device, they saved high-value information into the device and used their own memory for less important information instead,” he explained.
“The results show that external memory tools work. Far from causing ‘digital dementia’, using an external memory device can even improve our memory for information that we never saved. But we need to be careful that we back up the most important information. Otherwise, if a memory tool fails, we could be left with nothing but lower-value information in our own memory.”
