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an explicit instruction to remember the facts vs. not being told to remember had no impact on
participants’ rates of recall. This finding, dubbed by the authors as the “Google Effect,” and later
referred to by other researchers as “digital amnesia” (Kaspersky Lab, 2015) demonstrates that the
expectation of having later access to information can make us less inclined to encode and store that
information in long-term memory.
Sparrow et al. (2011)
further argued that we are
becoming symbiotic with
our technology;
remembering less actual
information and instead
committing to memory
where such information
can be found. To further
investigate this theory, the
researchers conducted an
additional experiment
using a design similar to that described above, but with three within-subject conditions. For one
third of the questions, participants were simply told that the information they entered was saved.
Another third of the questions resulted in the participants being told that the information was saved
into one of six pre-determined folders (named FACTS, DATA, INFO, NAMES, ITEMS, and
POINTS). The remaining third of the questions were followed by a prompt that informed the
participants that the information they typed was immediately deleted. The results of this experiment
indicated that participants were better able to recall the name of the folder in which the relevant
information was located than the information itself. The authors use this finding to claim that, “the
processes of human memory are adapting to the advent of new computing and communication
technology” (Sparrow et al., 2011, p. 778). A potential experimental confound that Sparrow et al.
do not discuss is the amount of “information” represented by the trivia fact vs. the name of the
folder. The authors provide an example fact, “The space shuttle Columbia disintegrated during re-
entry over Texas in February 2003.”
The complexity of the fact may make it more difficult to memorize than the name of the folder in
which the information is stored (i.e., FACTS). Future research should attempt to create more
balance between the trivia statements and the folder names.
Barr et al. (2015) recently reported findings from a further exploration of internet access via
smartphones and knowledge representation. In keeping with the notion that humans are generally
“cognitive misers” (Kahneman, 2011), these authors posited that the tendency to rely on simple
heuristics and mental shortcuts extends to the habitual use of internet search engines as a substitute
for deep cognitive analysis. In their experiment, Barr et al. (2015) gave participants a series of
cognitively demanding questions, including syllogisms, base-rate problems, and a “heuristics and
biases” battery. They also assessed participants’ knowledge in different cognitive domains through
administration of a numeracy test and a verbal i ntelligence test. Finally, participants were also
asked to provide an estimation of how much time per day they spend on their smartphones overall,
as well as an estimation of how much time they spend specifically using internet search engines on
their smartphones. The results showed that individuals who reported being heavy users of

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