New Delhi, July 14: Human memory is adapting to easy access to search engines and knowledge databases as people begin to use such resources as reservoirs of external memory, new research suggests.
US psychologists have shown that people are becoming more concerned about knowing where to find information rather than knowing the information itself in what they say is first scientific study of the Internet's impact on memory.
The scientists designed a set of four experiments involving student volunteers to explore whether ready access to search engines or databases might affect the way people store things in their heads. Their findings will appear in the US journal Science on Friday.
"The Internet is changing the way people use memory ' people have adapted memory to prioritise where to find information than to memorise information," said Betsy Sparrow, an assistant professor of psychology at Columbia University, lead author of the study.
Sparrow and her colleagues say their findings suggest that people are now treating online search engines or the Internet itself as an "external memory system" that can be accessed at will. This trend by itself would appear similar to other external memory systems that humans have used in the past ' telephone books, for instance ' but the volume and the diversity of information exceeds any such tools of the past.
"We don't need to store the same amount of data as we used to ' so information that is not essential for us to store we allow to remain in the external memory systems such as the Internet," Sparrow told The Telegraph in a telephone interview.
A clinical psychologist who was not associated with the study said its findings appear significant as they raise issues about the impact of search engines and databases on individuals as well as on society.
"Searching for information requires a person to evaluate each option as a hit or a miss, and search attentively for the best option among an array of possibilities," said Jamuna Rajan, an associate professor of clinical psychology at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, Bangalore. "So information searching may help enhance attention, working memory and decision-making," she said.
But, she said, the long-term and widespread dependence on search engines or databases may even impact in some ways on person-to-person transfer of knowledge, a tradition in society since the dawn of modern humans.
"If everyone begins to rely on computers for knowledge, the amount of knowledge that moves from person to person could decline," Jamuna said. "Such a trend may also have wider consequences on social interactions."
The experiments that Sparrow and her collaborators from Harvard University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison performed suggests that people quickly begin to think about computers when they need to find knowledge.
Their findings also suggest that people tend to forget things that they believe will be available through an external memory system such as a computer and remember things that they believe will not be available any more. In one experiment, the researchers also observed that people seem better able to remember which computer folder an item was placed into than the identity of the item itself.
These are signals that memory processes are adapting to computer tools, Sparrow said.
Sparrow is currently planning a fresh set of experiments to test whether the need to memorise less because of access to search engines may translate into an enhanced capacity to grasp conceptual issues.
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