New research recently showed that Googling information or searching for information from Google makes people more likely to forget things than reading it in a book; a phenomenon also called "digital amnesia" or the "Google effect."
As indicated in a Mail Online report, having a wealth of information available at the tip of the fingers on the internet may appear like a good way to advance human intelligence.
Researchers of this new study discovered that human brains don't tend to process the information on search engines like Google; deeply, it's known they're easily accessible and retrievable online, and thus, people don't bother learning it.
In fact, people are more likely to remember how to access such information like a keyword for a search engine query for one, than the information itself.
'Cognitive Misers'
Humans are considered "cognitive misers," the new research specified. Meaning, they have an inherent inclination to avoid any cognitive effort, likely because of pure laziness.
Conducted by Dr. Esther Kang at the Faculty of Management, Economics and Social Sciences, University of Cologne, Germany, the study is published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied.
Describing their study, Kang said ubiquitous internet access has offered "easy access to information" and has impacted users' attention and knowledge management.
She added that having information at a person's fingertips through electronic devices like smartphones and computers frequently diminishes recall and reduces attention.
"When externally stored information is easily accessible and retrievable," she continued, people have the tendency to deeply process the information since they can easily look up the information when needed.
3 Studies Conducted
People have an inherent inclination to minimize their cognitive demand and avoid cognitive effort, also known as cognitive miserliness, Kang, who conducted three studies, explained. These three studies are entitled, Learning, Forgetting, and Subscribing.
The first experiment investigated the ability of undergraduate students in the United States to recall the information of an online credit card offer. Kang discovered that the higher the ease of searching for information was perceived, the lower the recall of the information of the credit card offer.
In the second experiment, participants forgot the details in an advert once they found it was available in an online search. Then, in the third experiment, Kang discovered that people were more likely to subscribe to an online blog if it was easily accessible.
Higher or Lower 'Working Memory Capacity'
The experiments showed differences between people with higher or lower "working memory capacity," the ability to keep information while carrying out mental tasks.
Interestingly, participants with higher working capacity exhibited less meticulous learning of detailed information available on the internet. It may be that the more details one stores, the less detailed every bit of information is.
Dr. Kang explained, the strategic management of knowledge enables people to save attentional resources for other day-to-day activities. In general, the study revealed what impact storing information on devices has on the human brain's cognitive performance.
This goes back to the dawn of civilization, where recording information elsewhere other than the human brain proved controversial. In prehistoric Egyptian myth, Theuth, an inventor, presented the notion of writing to the Egyptian King Thamus, to allow information to become distributed and commonly known.
Thalmus was unimpressed, though, with the notion of writing and contended against it "for the good of human intelligence," a similar Verified News Explorer Channel report specified.
According to the 1992 book, Technopoly by Neil Postman, described by Scott London, Thamus said those who obtain writing would stop exercising their memory and turn forgetful.
They will depend on writing to bring things to their remembrance by outer signs, rather than their internal resources.
Related information about Google Effect or Digital Amnesia is shown on Science Group's YouTube video below:
RELATED ARTICLE : Google Search AI Has Improved: Search Songs By Humming or Whistling
Check out more news and information about Google and Brain in Science Times.
