The Google Effect On Memory:Its Cognitive And Neural Mechanism

Computers and the Internet have become important tools for human accessing and storing all kinds of information. The information in the human-computer system has its unique characteristics, which propose new memory processing ability requirements in order to process the information. And these changes may reshape the human brain to some extent. The research from Sparrow, Liu,&Wegner (2011) showed that the human-computer system has become an important part of human distributed memory system, which was called the "google effect". Although this research has great academic influence, it has some limitations. Based on this research, our research was conducted in order to investigate the cognitive processing characteristics and the neural mechanisms of "google effect on memory".Experiment1was carried out for the purpose of verifying the following hypothesis: when people were memorizing the paths that contained the informatin, they not only remembered the folder names of file system, but also they remembered the visual spatial location information of the file system to some extent. The participants were asked to learn40Chinese sentences in a series of documents. They were told that the information was very important for solving questions in the latter stage, thus need to be studied carefully. In the latter test section, they were asked to recognize the path that stored these sentences. In one condition, the names of these documents and folders were deleted, leaving only their visual spatial location unchanged; but in the other condition, the visual spatial locations were deleted, giving them only the names of these documents. The result of this experiment found that the recognition accuracy to the paths still significantly higher than the random leve(i.e.,50%) in both condition, which was verified the hypothesis.Experiment2was conducted in order to verify the following view:the google effect still exist in read world condition. The participants in group A were told that after they had learned40Chinese sentences in a series of documents, they would be deleted. But the participants in group B were told that they could retrieve the folders including these sentences when they were solving problems related to these sentences.40cloze test questions were composed according these sentences. Later, the participants were asked to fill in the blanks of20questions, and find the paths of the answer to the another20questions. The results revealed that the participants of group A could recall more sentence content than the participants in group B, but in the information search section their performances were much worse, which was verified the hypothesis.In experiment3, the neural processing mechanisms underlying the recall of Chinese sentences and the paths that contained them were investigated using EEG Firstly, the participants were told to learn60Chinese sentences in a series of documents and folders. In the test section, the participants were asked to either recall the content of a sentence or recall the path that contain a sentence. The result found that:the N400component which was relevant to the recall of semantic memory was elicited on the left frontal-temporal electrodes, regardless of recalling the sentence content or recalling the path. But its amplitude was more negative in the former condition. But, compared to the recall of sentences, the recall of path elicited a more positive slow wave on the parietal-occipital electrodes and a more negative ERP component on the right frontal electrodes.These experiments have revealed the distinct cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying the recalling of Chinese sentence content and the path that can find this information, and provided some empirical proof to the investigation of the reshape in the human brain function and structure for using computers.