Adrian Ward had been driving confidently through Austin, Texas for nine years – last November began to get lost. The Ward phone is working and Apple Maps is no longer working. Suddenly, Ward couldn’t even find a way to a good friend’s house, making him realize how dependent he had been on technology in the past. “I instinctively post a map and do what it says,” he says.
The ward experience reflects general complaints. That means the internet is damaging our memories. This fear has been shown in several studies over the past few years, and one software company has said it has been “digital” because it is known that digital devices are stored in place, and that it is “digital” for experiences that forgotten information. It led me to coincide with the term “amnesia.” Last year, Oxford University Press announced that the term that year was “brain corruption.”
“What you see there is all sorts of disastrous predictions about digital amnesia. “I’m going to lose my memory because I won’t use it anymore,” says Daniel Schacter, a memory researcher at Harvard University in Cambridge. . , Massachusetts.
Although the hallucinations of AI cannot be stopped, these techniques can limit its damage
In fact, various studies have drawn more complex pictures. Some suggest that internet and digital technologies will undermine the performance of certain learning and memory tasks or otherwise change performance. For example, people who navigate using GPS devices seem to have a bad idea of recalling routes. Ward, a psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, discovered that Google information gives people a bloated sense of their knowledge1. However, there is no compelling evidence that the technology has widespread and harmful effects on memory, researchers say. Elizabeth Marsh, a memory researcher at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, says claims such as “Google makes us stupid” are “exaggerated.”
The AI revolution raises many questions. Large-scale language models (LLMS) in which power tools such as CHATGPT are rapidly being embedded in search engines and other software are becoming part of the everyday experience for most people. It can also affect learning and memory in a deeper way than traditional Internet searches. “This whole chat Gpt thing is just another level of technology that is different, just by typing it into a Google browser and saying, ‘What is the capital of Madagascar?’,” says Marsh.
Researchers suggest that chatbots and other AI tools, for example, can make people cognitively lazy and even cultivate their minds with realistic false memories. Already, generative AI is being used to create “deadbots,” or digital avatars of dead people. “It’s a kind of thing that frames a past that we’ve never experienced,” says Andrew Hoskins, a researcher of AI and memory at the University of Edinburgh in the UK.
Google Effects
People have used technology for centuries to support memory, from printing presses to photography and video cameras. However, the idea that the internet is eroding human memories has gained status after a 2011 study by psychologist Betsy Sparrow. At the beginning of a series of experiments, they reported that people instinctively thought about the internet and computers presented them as if they were harboring itching to search for answers.
In other tests, participants seemed to be inappropriate to remember the trivia statement they entered into their computer when they were told that the machine would save the notes rather than erase them. They often remembered folders that stored facts better than the information itself. This research popularized the idea of ”Google Effect.” This prevails the idea of weakening themselves as people use the Internet as an external memory bank.
However, some researchers later questioned the reliability of these findings. Study 3 in 2018 failed to replicate the first experiment in Sparrow’s 2011 study. This explains the difference Sparrow argued.4. Second attempts to replicate the same experiment also failed to mirror the original results. “Google Effects is plausible and has attracted a lot of attention,” says Guido Hesselmann, a psychologist at the Psychology University of Berlin, who made his second attempt at replication. However, he adds, “When studying these ideas, higher standards need to be applied.”
Research shows that people don’t remember the route very well after navigating using GPS.Credit: Witthaya Prasongsin/Getty
Ward is a doctoral student and one of Sparrow’s co-authors, Harvard University Daniel Wegner, and is convinced by his 2011 study. The results fit the widely accepted concept 6 proposed by Wegner in the 1980s, called transactional memory. This says that by sharing it with others, such as a spouse or a colleague, reduces the burden of people remembering the information.
However, if the person we are trading with is the Internet, we may be relieved that we need to know a lot at all. “I have my smartphone in my pocket and searching Google is faster than searching my mind, so why did I put it in my head?” Ward says. This is a form of “cognitive off-roading” where people use anything from lists to calendars to phones to reduce brain demands.
Some of the most powerful data supporting cognitive offload comes from a 2010 GPS Navigation7 study, according to Carey Morewedge, a researcher at Boston University in Massachusetts. Driving simulator participants traveled the route with or without GPS support. They were then asked to drive the same route from memory. Those who used GPS were as bad at navigating as those who had never traveled the route at all.
A later study of virtual navigation skills suggested that spatial memory of people using GPS degrades faster than spatial memory of people using it less. Similarly, several studies suggest that taking photos can reduce the memory of photographed objects. At least in certain circumstances.
What is so special about the human brain? Graphical Guide
Cognitive offloading is adaptively meaningful as it frees up limited brain bandwidth to participate in other businesses. A study by researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz showed this effect. They asked students to study the verbal documents and randomly assigned some to save them. Those who saved the first file were able to better remember the words in the second file.
Other studies support the idea that people rely on the Internet as surrogate memory. In Ward’s Study1, he asked people to answer a series of trivia questions on Google or on their own. Those who used Google rated that on average more confident in their memory than those who later did not use search engines. Looking for answers didn’t seem to remind them of their ignorance. It made them think that online knowledge has always belonged to them.
“I think our knowledge is so internal and it’s preserved from the outside. And we have access to it and feel it’s our own,” Ward says. Masu.
Marsh says this false confidence inspired him to search, “If you can’t remember anything later, it might be one of the reasons you were so surprised.” Her experiment 10 suggests that this phenomenon can be attributed to search results that appear as a list of web links containing snippets of information about the page. A glimpse into these previews and selecting a page creates a sense of familiarity with the content of the page (what psychologists call “priming”). This effect can lead to people overestimating their knowledge. Researchers still don’t know if these types of misconceptions will be aggravated, as search engines provide AI-generated summary at the top of the search results.
Information overload
Schactor, who reviewed research on technology use and memory in 2022, together, from previous research, influenced memory performance for certain tasks, such as the Internet and technology memorizing routes and photo-taking items. They say there are compelling studies from research that can give the possibility of giving.
