When our memory starts to feel strained, we instinctively turn to the world around us — writing, sorting or rearranging things to help us think better. This is known as cognitive offloading.
While humans are good at this and have been doing it for a long time, a new review in Nature has reported that offloading strategies have become even simpler thanks to the technologies available at our fingertips these days. These strategies can be a range of activities like setting reminders for events, using Google Maps for directions, or asking ChatGPT to write emails.
This in turn, has raised questions and concerns about whether the risks of offloading ‘in excess’ could be becoming more pronounced.
Changes in cognitive offloading
“I think it’s possible that people expect technology-based offloading to be more reliable than other non-technological forms of offloading,” Lauren Richmond, associate professor of psychology at Stony Brook University and one of the authors of the study, said.
For example, she continued, setting a reminder for an event on the calendar app in our phones is easier than noting it in a physical calendar. We may not check the calendar on time but we’re unlikely to miss the notification on our phones.
Over time, humans have been offloading more and more information, and this is only expected to increase with the advent of artificial intelligence (AI).
“What’s changed in the digital age is its form. For example, we spend less effort storing facts in our heads, and more on learning where to find information and how to evaluate it,” Sam Gilbert, a professor at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, said. (He wasn’t involved in the review)
In several studies, scientists have found that cognitive offloading improves an individual’s performance on memory-based tasks.
“For people with developmental challenges/disabilities and lower working memory capacity, cognitive offloading is extremely useful,” Arpan Banerjee, a neuroscientist at the National Brain Research Centre, Gurgaon, said.
Costs of cognitive offloading
However, counting on offloading to help ease mental stress has costs. Research has found people showing poorer internal memory performance when the notes they’d offloaded suddenly became inaccessible. The Nature review added that in these contexts, people’s performance was lower than those who didn’t use cognitive offloading strategies at all.
“One big message about how to avoid the costs of cognitive offloading, based on what we know now, is not to lose access to information that you have offloaded,” Dr. Richmond said.
This means ensuring your phone is fully charged when you step out or downloading your notes to your computer in case the WiFi conks off.
Researchers have also found that people aren’t generally able to say if their notes have been manipulated, which raises the possibility of them inducing false memories.
“The creator of the store is more likely to accept the inserted item as part of the initially offloaded information and will do so with high confidence,” Dr. Richmond said. “This seems to have particular relevance for how we might accept modifications that could be made by others in shared files as part of our own memory for information contained in the file.”
Finally, studies have also reported a “Google effect”. Per Dr. Gilbert, “The effect refers to the way that we tend to forget information once we’ve written it down or stored it in a digital device.”
For example, we may not actively make efforts to remember the meaning of a word because we can get the answer in a few seconds with a search online. Dr. Gilbert also said this isn’t always harmful because such forms of offloading help free our minds to focus on other information.
Impact on children
Researchers are also interested in how the tools that make cognitive offloading possible today are affecting children — since they’re becoming incorporated more and more into classrooms and learning materials.
For instance, in one Massachusetts Institute of Technology study in June, student participants were divided into three groups and asked to write an essay: one group using a large language model (LLM), one using a search engine, and one without any assistance (i.e. on their own). When the participants were later switched to other groups, the researchers found that those writing essays from memory had the strongest, most distributed neural networks while the LLM users had the weakest, least distributed ones.
Over the next four months, the LLM-using students also fared worse at tasks that tested their neural, linguistic, and behavioural mettle.
“Over-reliance on any piece of technology can lead to lower working memory capacity over time,” Dr. Banerjee said. “However, this is totally dependent on the individual and is under one’s control.”
For these reasons, experts have said that children growing up around a plethora of digital tools need to be trained to critically question the output of machines.
“The kinds of skills that might be most useful for school-aged children to develop are different from the ones that were emphasised before such technologies permeated our everyday lives,” Dr. Richmond said.
However, memory won’t become irrelevant to learning, she added.
The long-term effects of large-scale cognitive offloading on our memory and cognitive functions aren’t clear yet and need more study. However, experts have said that offloading is changing the way we make demands of our memory.
“Specific to AI, people might need to remember how they have interacted with these types of tools to get high-quality information rather than remembering the information provided by the AI tool,” Dr. Richmond said.
“We certainly need to exercise caution, but if we fail to make use of effective tools, this can also cause harm. The key challenge is to balance risks and benefits, rather than uncritically embracing or shunning new technologies,” Dr. Gilbert said.
“There needs to be more supervision and collaboration by the developers of AI and other technologies with neuroscientists, psychologists, educators and ethics consultants,” Dr. Banerjee added.
nivedita.s@thehindu.co.in
