Sachdeva, Chhavi;
(2023)
Causes and consequences of cognitive offloading.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
The current thesis focuses on cognitive offloading. The first three chapters explore factors influencing cognitive offloading, namely metacognition and effort-minimisation while the last chapter focuses on the consequences of cognitive offloading on subsequently remembered information. The first chapter investigated whether metacognitive interventions designed to shift confidence also influence offloading behaviour. It was found that interventions designed to shift confidence also shifted participants’ offloading behaviour. It was also found that confidence cannot fully explain offloading behaviour. The second chapter explored whether other factors such as preference to avoid cognitive effort contribute to offloading behaviour. It was found that this factor influenced offloading such that the bias towards offloading was reduced (but not eliminated) in the group that received performance-based rewards, hypothesised to reduce effort-avoidance. The third chapter sought to examine whether offloading behaviour was also related to confidence in a task from an unrelated domain (in this case a pair of perceptual tasks). This chapter found that perceptual confidence was related with propensity to offload but not preference to offload, relative to the optimal strategy. The final chapter focused on the consequences of offloading where in the first experiment it was found that saving a list of words not only improved memory of that list but also improved memory for subsequently encoded information. However, this was dependent on the order in which the two lists were tested. The second experiment found that participants had a preference towards list-saving in a manner that matched the optimal strategy demonstrated by the first experiment. Collectively, the findings of this thesis will help our understanding of cognitive offloading so that we can guide individuals towards more effective offloading strategies to supplement memory.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | Causes and consequences of cognitive offloading |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2023. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| 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 |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10164146 |
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