Individual differences in cognitive offloading: A comparison of intention offloading, pattern copy, and short-term memory capacity

Abstract

The cognitive load of many everyday life tasks exceeds known limitations of short-term memory. One strategy to compensate for information overload is cognitive offloading which refers to the externalization of cognitive processes such as reminder setting instead of memorizing. There appears to be remarkable variance in offloading behavior between participants which poses the question whether there is a common factor influencing offloading behavior across different tasks tackling short-term memory processes. To pursue this question, we studied individual differences in offloading behavior between two well-established offloading ¬¬paradigms: the intention offloading task which tackles memory for intentions and the pattern copy task which tackles continuous short-term memory load. Our study also included an unrelated task measuring short-term memory capacity. Each participant completed all tasks twice on two consecutive days in order to obtain reliability scores. Despite high reliability scores, individual differences in offloading behavior were uncorrelated between the two offloading tasks. In both tasks, however, individual differences in offloading behavior were correlated with the individual differences in an unrelated short-term memory task. Our results therefore show that offloading behavior cannot simply be explained in terms of a single common factor driving offloading behavior across tasks. We discuss the implications of this finding for future research investigating the interrelations of offloading behavior across different tasks.

Outsourcing Memory to External Tools: A Review of ‘Intention Offloading’

“…Specifically, the rate of offloading was significantly correlated across the three tasks but the bias in each task, relative to the optimal strategy, was not. On the other hand, Meyerhoff et al (2021) did not find any significant association between cognitive offloading strategies measured in an intention offloading task and a perceptual block-copy task. In sum, we know relatively little about domain-specific versus domaingeneral contributions to cognitive offloading strategies, and the impact of metacognitive training on those strategies.…”

Impact of Intrinsic Cognitive Skills and Metacognitive Beliefs on Tool Use Performance

“…In other words, we have replicated this effect four times with more than 540 participants. Tak-en together with similar findings from other research groups (e.g., Gilbert, 2015aGilbert, , 2015bMeyerhoff et al, 2021), these results confirm that the link between intrinsic cognitive skills and tool use performance is robust. The additional question here was whether the link between intrinsic cognitive skills and tool use performance is linear or exponential.…”

“…Participants also performed the task while prohibited from using external aids. The results indicated a strong correlation between both conditions (i.e., without and with external aids; see also Boldt & Gilbert, 2019; for similar results obtained with additional tasks assessing the cognitive function targeted independently of the main experiment, see Gilbert, 2015a;Meyerhoff, Grinschgl, Papenmeier, & Gilbert, 2021). This finding was corroborated by the study by Virgo et al (2017), who found a strong relationship between performance in non-tool use (mental calculation) and tool use (calculator) conditions (n = 72, r = .58).…”

“…This leads us to a third interpretation, which is that intrinsic cognitive skills could systematically influence tool use performance even if the nature of this influence could depend on the task (see Gilbert, 2015a;Meyerhoff et al, 2021;Osiurak et al, 2018). Thus, in the case of calculator use, intrinsic cognitive skills can help the person generate a rough estimate of the result and thereby check whether there was no error during the procedure.…”

Consequences of cognitive offloading: Boosting performance but diminishing memory

“…Thus, the consequences of cognitive offloading are comparable across different offloading paradigms. However, individual differences in offloading behaviour appear to be uncorrelated across different research paradigms (Meyerhoff et al, preprint), which urges for further research investigating the relationship of consequences of offloading behaviour across paradigms. Returning to the converging findings with regard to the consequences of cognitive offloading, Pyke and LeFevre (2011) observed that using a calculator in an alphanumerical test led to a higher response accuracy but in return to a worse subsequent recall of the solution.…”