Summary
Reminders and digital storage can reduce mental workload and support future tasks, but they can also leave important knowledge unlearned or vulnerable to device failure.
At a glance
Cognitive offloading uses reminders, devices, or other external aids to reduce cognitive load and support memory, arithmetic, counting, and spatial reasoning. It may also free resources for other tasks, although experiments must distinguish this effect from simply making a task easier. External storage is most useful when information only needs to remain retrievable; material that must be understood or recalled should still be studied, and sole storage devices should be protected against loss or failure.
A few days ago, Xuetang Jun noticed that the computer was almost out of storage space.
(Wait, didn’t we just move everything from the C drive to the D drive last month?)
After checking the computer from top to bottom, Xuetang Jun concluded that there was nothing left to delete.
But leaving the computer packed to capacity was not a solution either...
With that in mind, Xuetang Jun picked up a nearby USB drive and began cutting and pasting files onto it. “Looks like I’ll have to put you to work.”
Some time later, Xuetang Jun urgently needed an important paper stored on the USB drive. Just as it was about to be opened and searched, Xuetang Jun discovered that the drive had been infected by a virus and could no longer be accessed.
Full of regret, Xuetang Jun thought, “If only I’d backed up everything on that USB drive...”
This kind of thing does not happen only with computer files.
Xuetang Jun’s friend Xiao A often sets alarms and reminders on a phone, believing that this effectively cuts information from the brain and pastes it onto a cyber USB drive, so forgetting it personally does not matter.
Then one day, Xiao A dropped the phone into water. The cyber USB drive was reduced to a cyber brick.
Xiao A had no choice but to get the phone repaired, fearing that without its reminders, some genuinely important things might be forgotten.
Your Memory Has Been Moved to a Cyber USB Drive...
In fact, Xiao A’s use of reminders to support memory, our everyday reliance on calculators for arithmetic, and even tilting our heads to view a slanted image are all ways of using the body or a tool to reduce a task’s information-processing demands, ease cognitive load, and support thought.
In psychology, such methods are known as cognitive offloading [1].
Research indicates that cognitive offloading can improve performance in tasks involving memory, arithmetic, counting, and spatial reasoning.
Xiao A’s use of calendars and alarms as reminders is an application of cognitive offloading in the realm of memory.
1. Intention Offloading: The Reminder as a Cyber USB Drive
The tasks that Xiao A records in calendars and alarms are called intentions [1].
Prospective memory is often described as the ability to carry out intentions: remembering something that needs to be done and completing it at a future time [2]. Intention offloading, by contrast, is a memory aid that records those tasks on another device or tool [3,4].
People commonly use this kind of memory aid when they lack confidence in their memory, face an excessive memory load, or encounter too much interference [5].
Sharp-eyed readers may already have spotted the obvious question: isn’t this simply a reminder?
Yes, it is.
One study asked participants to remember certain special balls—such as Ball 7 in Figure D—and, after completing other activities, drag them to designated locations. When participants first moved those balls closer to their target locations to serve as reminders, thereby offloading their intentions, their task performance improved substantially [6].
It is like being told by your mother to pick up a bottle of soy sauce while you are out having fun. Compared with keeping “buy soy sauce” continuously in mind, setting a reminder and an alarm makes it more likely that you will actually bring the soy sauce home.
Research into the mechanisms of intention offloading further suggests that such reminders may improve prospective-memory performance by reducing the burden of remembering an object’s specific features while increasing the efficiency of attentional switching and strengthening executive function [7].
In other words, once “bring soy sauce home” has been recorded, a person no longer has to keep picturing the soy sauce and can enjoy the outing with less worry. At the same time, improved executive functioning makes completing the task of bringing it home easier.
But if we accidentally delete the reminder saying “bring soy sauce home,” does the offloaded task still remain in our own memory?
2. Cognitive Spillover: Does the Cyber USB Drive Take Memories Out of Our Minds?
In everyday life, we often find that concentrating more intensely on one area improves our performance there. At the same time, however, our performance in other areas may decline.
Researchers suggest that this may happen because focusing on a particular area concentrates our cognitive resources there, potentially diverting resources away from other areas.
This phenomenon is called cognitive spillover [8].
For example, when taking a mathematics exam, using written calculations or a calculator to reduce the burden of computation can leave us freer to concentrate on how to solve the problem.
That is, when cognitive offloading reduces the attention we must devote to a priority goal, the cognitive resources it frees may become available for other tasks.
Researchers have demonstrated this effect in the field of prospective memory [9].
They used the same experimental paradigm described earlier, designating some balls as high-value and others as low-value.
The researchers initially set out only to examine the relationship between value and cognitive offloading. Unexpectedly, although participants preferentially offloaded the high-value balls, performance improved most on the low-value-ball task.
In other words, accuracy improved not only for the tasks that had been offloaded, as described above, but also for those that had not.
To investigate why, the researchers then allowed participants to move only the high-value balls closer to their target locations, restricting intention offloading to the high-value task.
The results were broadly the same as in Experiment 1. The researchers also found a significant relationship between performance on the low-value task and the proportion of high-value tasks that participants offloaded [9].
This suggests that once the high-value goals had been offloaded, participants may have devoted more cognitive resources to the low-value task.
However, because completion rates for the high-value task also increased, the evidence was not yet sufficient to establish that conclusion fully.
What was still missing?
Perhaps the researchers also needed to show that performance had not improved simply because the task had become easier.
More specifically, they needed to rule out the possibility that improvement came from reducing three kinds of target—high-value, low-value, and ordinary balls—to just two—low-value and ordinary balls—and show that it resulted solely from cognitive resources being freed when the high-value task was offloaded.
The researchers therefore added a randomly triggered procedure. After the high-value balls had been moved closer to their targets, all the balls—including those associated with offloaded intentions—were rearranged into a single line, removing the external markers of offloading. Participants then continued dragging the balls in order to their designated locations.
Under these conditions, accuracy on the low-value-ball task actually exceeded accuracy on the high-value-ball task.
The researchers took this as evidence that offloading the high-value balls had indeed freed space in participants’ memory, which was then reallocated to the low-value balls.
This also suggests that intention offloading effectively “cuts” what needs to be remembered from the mind and pastes it onto a cyber USB drive, making room for other tasks.
But following that logic, if we moved every memory outside ourselves, wouldn’t our minds be left with nothing at all?
When the Cyber USB Drive Takes All Your Memories...
In an era of growing dependence on electronic devices, a new form of forgetting has quietly emerged: people tend to forget information stored on digital devices. This is known as digital amnesia [10–12].
Think about what happens after we photograph a presentation. By the end of the term, its contents often seem far more unfamiliar than we expected.
To investigate whether digital amnesia is related to the memory effects of cognitive offloading, we must first understand the concept of a transactive memory system [1,12].
Within such a system, a person’s memories are distributed across multiple storage locations, so the burden carried by the brain itself remains relatively light. It resembles cutting and pasting a computer’s files onto several USB drives to free space and reduce the load on the computer.
The person’s memory task then shifts from retaining the actual content to remembering its location—for example, “Which folder contains this file?” [1].
At the same time, people tend to treat everything stored on those other media as part of their own memory, mistakenly believing that they have more knowledge “in their heads” [13].
In reality, however, the material stored on phones, in reminders, in photo albums, and on similar media has not been committed to memory in our brains.
That is why presentation content that seems as though it ought to be in our minds can mysteriously disappear.
This may also mean that if the memories held on these cyber USB drives are lost, our recall of information offloaded to a phone will be impaired, leaving us with no apparent option but to repair the device [12].
Yet, as discussed earlier, cognitive offloading can be an excellent tool when we are only required to remember where information is kept. A librarian, for example, does not need to remember which person borrowed every book on every date, only how to organize and retrieve the lending records.
Cognitive offloading can also lighten our cognitive load, give us a clearer memory of how to complete the task as a whole [7,14], and keep us from becoming distracted when the memory demands are too difficult [7].
So the risks are no reason to reject cognitive offloading altogether.
The more important questions are these: How can cognitive offloading be used sensibly? And in a digital age dominated by powerful cyber USB drives such as phones and computers, how can we prevent digital amnesia and avoid ending up with empty heads?
Xuetang Jun has two suggestions:
First, if your work requires you to remember or carry out everything you have offloaded elsewhere—as when a closed-book exam requires you to learn the presentation material—do not indiscriminately move everything onto another medium. Select what genuinely belongs in external storage, such as important material that will not be tested but may need to be consulted later. Then make the effort to read and remember what the work actually requires you to know, and genuinely acquire the forms of thought and reasoning it demands.
Second, if your work places fewer demands on your own memory or thinking, you may rely more on external storage—but keep a close watch on your phone, computer, and USB drives. Protect them from viruses and do not lose them. If they disappear, your mind really will be left empty!
Xuetang Jun quietly opened the phone’s photo album and found many images whose original reason for being captured or saved was now impossible to remember. Technology deserves credit for reducing our cognitive burden, but remember: do not consign what you truly need to remember to the memory black holes called “Photo Album” and “Cloud Storage.”
Frequently asked questions
What is cognitive offloading?
Cognitive offloading uses the body or an external tool to reduce a task’s information-processing demands, ease cognitive load, and support thought.
How can intention offloading support prospective memory?
Recording future tasks in calendars, alarms, or other tools can improve the likelihood that intentions are completed, particularly when memory load or interference is high.
Can offloading one task improve performance on another?
The experiments suggest that offloading high-value goals may free cognitive resources for lower-value tasks. However, the researchers first had to distinguish resource reallocation from improvement caused merely by making the task easier.
When should information remain in personal memory?
Material that must be understood, recalled, or used without external access should be studied and retained. External storage is more appropriate when a person mainly needs to remember where retrievable information is kept.
What is the main risk of relying on digital memory?
Information stored on phones and similar media may not be committed to personal memory, and recall can be impaired if the sole external device is damaged, infected, deleted, or lost.
