Saved information is remembered less well than deleted information, if the saving process is perceived as reliable

ABSTRACT

Prior research has shown that people are more likely to remember information that is deleted from a computer than information that is saved on a computer, presumably because saving serves as a form of cognitive offloading. Given recent concerns about the robustness and replicability of this “Google Effect,” we conducted two experiments seeking to replicate and extend the phenomenon by identifying a potential boundary condition for when it is observed. In Experiment 1, we replicated the Google Effect, but only when participants experienced a practice phase demonstrating the reliability of the saving process. No evidence of a Google Effect was observed when participants experienced a practice phase demonstrating the saving process to be unreliable. In Experiment 2, we replicated the results of Experiment 1 in the reliable condition, while demonstrating the effect to be robust across 10 different topics of trivia statements. Taken together, these results suggest that the Google Effect is a replicable phenomenon, but that the perceived reliability of the saving process is critical for determining whether it is observed.

KEYWORDS:

• Transactive memory
• memory
• Google Effect
• cognitive offloading

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Before beginning the practice phase of the experiment, the experimenter showed the participant a survey that consisted of the ten topics. The participants were told to rank order the topics based on their familiarity with the topics, with a 1 indicating that the topic was most familiar to them, and a 10 indicating that the topic was least familiar to them. After rank ordering the topics, participants were asked to indicate how well they knew each topic using a 5-point Likert scale, with 1 being most familiar, and 5 being not familiar at all. One of the motivations for Experiment 2, at least initially, was to explore whether familiar topics might be less susceptible to the Google Effect than unfamiliar topics. Given issues with the limited number of statements per topic (which often resulted in topics having either all statements saved or deleted, thus preventing us from measuring the Google Effect), and the fact that judgments of familiarity at the topic level might not correspond to judgments of familiarity at the item level, we opted to focus our analysis on recall performance overall, and not breakdown the results as a function of familiarity.