The debate about whether or not computers are making us dumber, largely speculative to this point, has recently gotten a healthy dose of scientific data. Last week scientists at Columbia University published a report showing that our dependency on Google for information has changed how we think.
The study involved a series of experiments that tested how much people rely on readily-available information in lieu of committing it to memory. In the first experiment students were given true-or-false statements after which they were presented a series of colored words for which they had to match each word to its color. Typically reaction times for this task are slower if the word relates to what the person is thinking–if the question involves an ostrich, matching “bird” to its color would take longer than matching “ladder” to its color, for example. Interestingly, they found that reaction times for words related to the Internet, such as “Google” or “Yahoo,” got slower reactions times, indicating that the students were thinking about looking the answers up online. When presented with any factual question, to Google is now a human instinct.
The next set of experiments showed that the students’ memory suffered if they were told that whatever they learned would be saved on the computer, as if they resisted “saving” the data to their own memory if it was already being saved in the computer’s. But then something interesting happened. Even though they couldn’t recall the facts, they recalled very well the specific computer folders into which the facts had been saved. Betsy Sparrow, lead author in the study, summed it up by saying that the students “were better at remembering where information was stored than the information itself.”
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