Meyerhoff, HS;
Grinschgl, S;
Papenmeier, F;
Gilbert, SJ;
(2021)
Individual differences in cognitive offloading: a comparison of intention offloading, pattern copy, and short-term memory capacity.
Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications
, 6
, Article 34. 10.1186/s41235-021-00298-x.
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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.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Individual differences in cognitive offloading: a comparison of intention offloading, pattern copy, and short-term memory capacity |
| Location: | England |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1186/s41235-021-00298-x |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1186/s41235-021-00298-x |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
| Keywords: | Individual differences, Reliability, Cognitive offloading, Intention offloading task, Pattern copy task |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences > Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10128053 |
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