The use of online search engines such as Google, Yahoo … or Internet databases has had a certain influence on the way we remember information, according to a report from a study. research done by scientists.
Betsy Sparrow, assistant professor of psychology at Columbia University (USA), who led the study, said the research goal is to find out if we are more likely to remember the information we know. is it stored in the computer or not.
For testing, Ms. Sparrow and her colleagues created four tests. One of them asked the participants of the experiment to type 40 events into the computer, something like “African Ostrich has bigger eyes than its brain” … Half of the participants were said that the above information will be stored on the computer, the remaining people are told that they will be deleted. The results show that the group of people who are told that the information will be deleted has a higher memory capacity than those who know the information will be stored. This “don’t miss” group of people doesn’t need to spend much effort to remember them because they know they can review it when they need it later.
The second test is done to determine if computer use habits affect our memory. For example, when asking the question, “Is there a country where the flag has only one color?” Will we think of good flags that immediately open the online computer to search for that answer? Here, test participants are required to memorize each of the above event statements and folders containing that sentence, out of the 5 folders available on the computer. The results show that they remember these directories quite well.
The purpose of this test is to understand an aspect called “Transactive Memory”, a concept that tells us to “use” other people like friends, relatives or family members. family to store information for us. For example, Mrs. Sparrow said: “I love watching baseball and I know my husband knows very well about the facts. So every time I want to know something, I just need to ask him if I will get an answer right away. need to remember them “.
Sparrow said, so far, the study of the impact of the Internet on our memory has many mysteries. But the team’s experiment showed that the Internet has become a major source of information storage outside our brains
