Memory and Technology: How We Use Information in the Brain and the World PDF
Preview Memory and Technology: How We Use Information in the Brain and the World
Jason R. Finley · Farah Naaz Francine W. Goh Memory and Technology How We Use Information in the Brain and the World Memory and Technology Jason R. Finley • Farah Naaz • Francine W. Goh Memory and Technology How We Use Information in the Brain and the World Jason R. Finley Farah Naaz Department of Behavioral Sciences Department of Psychological & Brain Fontbonne University Sciences St. Louis, MO, USA University of Louisville Louisville, KY, USA Francine W. Goh Department of Psychology University of Nebraska–Lincoln Lincoln, NE, USA Additional material to this book can be downloaded from http://extras.springer.com ISBN 978-3-319-99168-9 ISBN 978-3-319-99169-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99169-6 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018953336 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Preface Humanity has always been the species that extends itself into the environment. Memory is no exception. Internal memory is information stored in one’s brain, and external memory is information stored outside of one’s brain (either socially or technologically). Humans have a long history of using external memory, and we interact extensively with it in our everyday lives. External memory is integral to human cognition and behavior, though twenty- first- century technology (e.g., smartphones, the Internet) may be changing how we use it and how we use our own internal memory as well. However, psychological research and theory on this overall topic has so far been limited and fragmentary. With this book, we seek to rectify that. The story of how this book came to be is one of friendship, fruitful disagreement, scientific curiosity, ingenuity, and perseverance. This project arose from conversa- tions (debates, really) between the first two authors, JRF and FN, about the extent to which technology was helping or hurting human cognition. It was 2013, and we were both postdoctoral researchers at Washington University in St. Louis. In lab meetings, and over fruity cocktails at happy hour, we debated. Is human memory getting worse? Is high-tech external memory supplanting us or augmenting us? Like any good scientists, we decided that the only way to settle our lively disagreements was empirically. But we found that barely any psychological data existed yet on this important topic. So we joined forces to gather some. But we did not have any funding. That is, until we discovered the crowdfunding platform, Experiment.com. In 2014, with help from the SciFund Challenge and the generous support of many backers (see Acknowledgments), we raised the funds needed to develop and run a large survey in which we could ask just about every question we could think of that we wanted answers to. We ran the survey in 2015 and then painstakingly analyzed our rich trove of new data over the next year or two, with third author FWG joining us to lend a big assist with the qualitative data. Naturally, each exciting answer led to more questions, and as we developed a frame- work to make sense of our data, we also saw the ways that our questions connected to a constellation of other research both within and beyond psychology, which no one had yet brought together to review in one place. As we undertook such a review v vi Preface ourselves, working on academic breaks and weekends, it became clear that this side project of ours had bloomed into a larger endeavor than we had foreseen and one that was unlikely to fit in the confines of a typical journal article. We had, in fact, ended up writing a book. Fortunately, the prospect of publication became a reality after JRF met with Springer editor, Lilith Dorko, at the 2017 annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society in Vancouver. After much revision, and peer review, the result is the book that you are currently reading. The organization of the book is somewhat atypical. There are three parts, which we characterize as the present, the past, and the future. In Part I, the present, we report the results of our comprehensive survey on the inter- play of internal and external memory in everyday life and how that is changing in the early twenty-first century (N = 476 Mechanical Turk participants). The survey included quantitative and qualitative questions about attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, and experiences. In Part II, the past, we provide a thorough interdisciplinary review of the disparate prior literature on external memory, including relevant theoretical frameworks from disciplines across the sciences, arts, and humanities. In Part III, the future, we synthesize our results with our review of the literature to offer a new theoretical framework for understanding the interplay of internal and external mem- ory. We also provide a guide to important dimensions, questions, and methods for future research. Briefly, our work reveals an overall picture of a growing symbiosis between internal and external memory. The two complement and depend on each other. Technological external memory (both low-tech and high-tech) is augmenting inter- nal memory for episodic purposes and supplanting internal memory for semantic and prospective purposes. The main strengths of internal memory are rapid conve- nient access to frequently used information, rich vivid representations including sensations and emotions, personal meaning, creativity, and security. The main strengths of technological external memory are access to infrequently used informa- tion, accuracy, precision, longevity, capacity, fidelity, and social sharing. This book should be of interest to scholars and students of memory from a vari- ety of disciplines, psychology in particular, as well as anyone curious about how technology is affecting human memory. Internal and external memories have mutu- ally shaped each other for tens of thousands of years and will continue to do so into the future. Although we may not have settled every debate, with this book, we have laid the groundwork for much-needed future work, both empirical and theoretical. St. Louis, MO, USA Jason R. Finley Louisville, KY, USA Farah Naaz Lincoln, NE, USA Francine W. Goh Acknowledgments This work was made possible by crowdfunding through Experiment.com (formerly MicroRyza), https://doi.org/10.18258/1866. We give our sincerest thanks to our gen- erous backers: Pooja K. Agarwal, Richard Bunker, Rick Finley, Ruth Gardner, Anne Kahrs, Denny Luan, Breanna McBride, Jill Moed, David G. Pavlick, Joan Saberhagen, Clive Thompson, Steven Winebrenner, and 44 others (https://doi.org/10.18258/1866). We are also grateful to the SciFund Challenge (https://www.scifundchallenge.org) which helped us launch and complete our crowdfunding campaign. For helpful com- ments, advice, references, data, and/or peer review, we thank Wolfgang Schönpflug, Linda A. Henkel, Clive Thompson, Cathy Marshall, Emily Schryer, Michael A. Ross, Laurel C. Newman, Todd Hennessy, Carrie L. Freeman, Julie A. Portman, Henry L. Roediger, Sarah Kitsos at Kaspersky Lab, and Mike Hodges at BullGuard. We thank Lilith Dorko, editor for Springer, for the opportunity to publish this work, and K. Andrew DeSoto for introducing us to her. vii Contents Part I Empirical Report (The Present) 1 Introduction and Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Participants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Design and Materials . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Procedure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 2 Results: Attitudes and Beliefs About Internal and External Memory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Data Cleaning and Scoring . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Attitudes and Beliefs: Internal Memory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Attitudes and Beliefs: External Memory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Attitudes and Beliefs: Interplay Between Internal and External Memory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 3 Results: Behaviors and Experiences with Internal and External Memory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 Behaviors and Experiences: Internal Memory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 Behaviors and Experiences: External Memory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 General Use . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 Everyday/Low-Tech Strategies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Specific Forms of External Memory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 Taking Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 External Memory Retrieval Failures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 Information Use and Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 Emotions and Cues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 Passwords . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 ix x Contents Phone Numbers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 Backup . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 Social Media and Social Use of Memory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 Cameras and Photos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 4 Results: The Interplay Between Internal and External Memory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 Qualitative Data on the Interplay Between Internal and External Memory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 Internal Memory: Relative Strengths and Uses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 External Memory: Relative Strengths and Uses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 Internal Versus External Memory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 Symbiosis of Internal and External Memory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 Changes in the Interplay Between Internal and External Memory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 Correlations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 Composite Variables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 Age . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64 Sex . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 Unease About Reliance on Technology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 Personal Characteristics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 Other Variables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70 Part II Literature Review (The Past) 5 Theoretical Perspectives from Across Psychology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 Transactive Memory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 Metacognition (Metamemory) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 Exograms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81 Prospective Memory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 Working Memory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 Human Factors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88 Cognitive Rehabilitation and Other Clinical Practices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 Offloading Beyond Memory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93 6 Theoretical Perspectives from Other Disciplines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 Philosophy of Mind . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 Dynamic Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 Personal Information Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 Library and Information Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110 Media and Cultural Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112 Photography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113 Contents xi Collective Memory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116 Anthropology and Archaeology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123 Part III Discussion and Guide for Research (The Future) 7 A Framework and Methods for Researching the Interplay of Internal and External Memory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139 Summary of Results from the Current Study . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139 Framework for Interplay of Internal and External Memory . . . . . . . . . . . 140 Limitations of the Current Study . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142 Methods for Studying External Memory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144 Surveys . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144 Experiments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145 Developmental Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145 Content Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146 Ethnography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147 Experience Sampling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148 Data from Beyond Academic Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150 8 Important Dimensions and Unanswered Questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155 Important Dimensions of External Memory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155 Dimensions Proposed by Others . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155 Dimensions We Propose for Further Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 Other Research Questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165 When and Why Do People Use External Memory? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165 How Can We Measure and/or Manipulate the Cost or Effort of Using External Memory? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166 How Do People Metacognitively Monitor and Control Their Use of External Memory? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167 Is the Objective Accuracy of External Memory Perhaps Overstated? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167 Backup Practices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168 Prospective Memory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168 Measurement and Operationalization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168 Developmental Questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169 Classifying and Keeping Up with External Memory Technology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169 Is Technology Making Memory Worse? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173
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