Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips

By B. Sparrow, Jenny J W Liu, Daniel M. Wegner. Science, 2011

1,409 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental and Educational Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/52efd857b500531e040a9366b3eb5bb0ea543979

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Citations in the corpus

Distributed situation awareness (2016, background): “This idea is founded on the theory of ‘transactional memory’, which involves the reliance that people have on other people (Wegner 1986) and machines (Sparrow, Liu, and Wegner 2011) to remember for them.”
Smartphones and Cognition: A Review of Research Exploring the Links between Mobile Technology Habits and Cognitive Functioning (2017, methodology): “Sparrow et al. (2011) further argued that we are becoming symbiotic with our technology; remembering less actual information and instead committing to memory where such information can be found.”
Governance of algorithms: options and limitations (2015, background): “…rights (Clark, 2010, 2012; Chiou and Tucker, 2013; Quinn, 2014); 7. abuse of market power (Patterson, 2013); 8. effects on cognitive capabilities and the human brain (Carr, 2010; Sparrow et al., 2011); and 9. growing heteronomy and loss of human sovereignty and controllability of technology.”
The “online brain”: how the Internet may be changing our cognition (2019, background): “However, with fewer than 30 years since the Internet became publicly available, the longterm effects have yet to be estab lished.”
Sociology in the Era of Big Data: The Ascent of Forensic Social Science (2015, neutral): “Nonetheless, digital — and especially mobile — communications technologies are diffusing at a staggering rate (e.g. Castells et al. 2007); many population-level datasets are compiled by government or other record-keeping organizations and inclusion is not biased by “ self-selection ” ; and given our”
Cognitive Offloading. (2016, background): “Consistent with this idea, saving an external file can lead to an enhanced ability to recall where to find information, at the expense of remembering what it actually is ([34]; for an alternative explanation see [53]).”
Artificial intelligence and illusions of understanding in scientific research (2024, neutral): “Increasingly, people are granting epistemic trust not only to people, but also to digital tools, including AI 82–84 .”
Information technology and consumer behavior in travel and tourism: insights from travel planning using the internet. (2015, background): “First, the Internet is now comprised of a huge amount of information which essentially represents the “external memory” for many people, and as a result, individuals have now become increasingly reliant upon it for everyday life (Sparrow et al., 2011).”
Individual Text Corpora Predict User-Specific Knowledge: Benchmarks of Individualized Knowledge Simulation (2026, unknown): “Beyond this, web search itself can function as a form of external, or transactive, memory: as people come to expect continuous online access to information, they tend to remember where to find it rather than the content itself (Sparrow et al., 2011).”