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Thursday
Jul282011

673 - Google Effects on Memory - Info at Our Fingertip Consequences?

Learning TRENDS by Elliott Masie - July 28, 2011.
#673 - Updates on Learning, Business & Technology.
55,349 Readers - http://www.masie.com - The MASIE Center.
Host of Learning 2011 - Over 746 Registered Already!

Special:  “Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips”

A recently released study caught my eye this month, focusing on the changing nature of how learners deal with memorization.  Dr. Betsy Sparrow, a psychology professor at Columbia University, has been studying the impact of the access to search engines on learner’s expectations and processing of memory.  Her work, which is done with several colleagues, was so fascinating that it was covered by The New York Times and PBS.  And, I reached out to her and she has agreed to be a keynoter at Learning 2011 in November in Orlando.

Here is the abstract of Dr. Sparrow’s paper in Science Magazine: “The advent of the Internet, with sophisticated algorithmic search engines, has made accessing information as easy as lifting a finger. No longer do we have to make costly efforts to find the things we want. We can “Google” the old classmate, find articles online, or look up the actor who was on the tip of our tongue. The results of four studies suggest that when faced with difficult questions, people are primed to think about computers and that when people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it. The Internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves.”

There is a great video interview with her at our site:

http://www.learning2011.com

Dr. Sparrow and her collaborators, Daniel M. Wegner of Harvard and Jenny Liu of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, staged four different memory experiments. In one, participants typed 40 bits of trivia — for example, “an ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain” — into a computer. Half of the subjects believed the information would be saved in the computer; the other half believed the items they typed would be erased.

The subjects were significantly more likely to remember information if they thought they would not be able to find it later. “Participants did not make the effort to remember when they thought they could later look up the trivia statement they had read,” the authors write.

A second experiment was aimed at determining whether computer accessibility affects precisely what we remember. “If asked the question whether there are any countries with only one color in their flag, for example,” the researchers wrote, “do we think about flags — or immediately think to go online to find out?”

In this case, participants were asked to remember both the trivia statement itself and which of five computer folders it was saved in. The researchers were surprised to find that people seemed better able to recall the folder.

“That kind of blew my mind,” Dr. Sparrow said in an interview.

The experiment explores an aspect of what is known as transactive memory — the notion that we rely on our family, friends and co-workers as well as reference material to store information for us.

I am very excited to have Betsy Sparrow join us at Learning 2011.  I will be interviewing her in one of the opening keynote session and she will participate in our new Research to Practice sessions, where there will be drill-down conversations about the impact of this type of research on our learning design.

Once again, check out the video interview of her at http://www.learning2011.com and click on Dr. Sparrows picture on the home page.

This is one of the really fun parts of being the Designer of our annual global event. I get to reach out to really smart and creative people doing great work in fields that have impact — and then get to introduce them to the critical world of workplace learning. 

Yours in learning,

Elliott Masie
email: emasie@masie.com

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