ArticleCognitive research: principles and implications2020
Offloading items from memory: individual differences in cognitive offloading in a short-term memory task.
Article in Cognitive research: principles and implications, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
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Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed.
- From principle to practice: Developing a digital-age clinical artificial intelligence ethics competence framework through early-career doctors' experiences.Medical education · 2026Article
- Is It Mine or Not Mine? Cognitive Offloading to Generative AI and Concern over the Erosion of Cognitive Ownership.Journal of Intelligence · 2026Article
- Between Alarms and Scheduling: The Effect of Cognitive Offloading on Prospective and Retrospective Memory.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- The impact of artificial intelligence perception on university students' academic engagement: the mediating role of academic motivation and the moderating role of academic self-efficacy.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Development and Psychometric Validation of the Brain Rot Scale: Measuring Digital Content Overconsumption Among Generation Alpha and Generation Z.European journal of investigation in health, psychology and education · 2025Article
- Does expecting external memory support cost recognition memory?Memory & cognition · 2025Article
- Generative AI tool use enhances academic achievement in sustainable education through shared metacognition and cognitive offloading among preservice teachers.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Individual differences in prospective and retrospective memory offloading.Journal of memory and language · 2025Article
- The role of short-term memory, type of practice and metacognitive judgments in predicting cognitive offloading.Frontiers in cognition · 2025Article
- Mutual interplay between cognitive offloading and secondary task performance.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2023Article
- Eye Movements as Proxy for Visual Working Memory Usage: Increased Reliance on the External World in Korsakoff Syndrome.Journal of clinical medicine · 2023Article
- Take a load off: examining partial and complete cognitive offloading of medication information.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2023Article
- Outsourcing Memory to External Tools: A Review of 'Intention Offloading'.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2023Review
- Ecological validity of don't remember and don't know for distinguishing accessibility- versus availability-based retrieval failures in older and younger adults: knowledge for news events.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2023Article
- From metacognitive beliefs to strategy selection: does fake performance feedback influence cognitive offloading?Psychological research · 2021Article
- Consequences of cognitive offloading: Boosting performance but diminishing memory.Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006) · 2021Article
- Individual differences in cognitive offloading: a comparison of intention offloading, pattern copy, and short-term memory capacity.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
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Abstract
Cognitive offloading refers to the act of reducing the mental processing requirements of a task through physical actions like writing down information or storing information on a cell phone or computer. Offloading can lead to improved performance on ongoing tasks with high cognitive demand, such as tasks where multiple pieces of information must be simultaneously maintained. However, less is known about why some individuals choose to engage in offloading and under what conditions they might choose to do so. In the present study, offloading behavior is investigated in a short-term memory task requiring memory for letters. The present study is a replication and extension of a previous study conducted by Risko and Dunn, and tests the new prediction that individuals with lower working memory capacity will be more likely to offload. Here, we find that offloading information confers a performance advantage over relying on internal memory stores, particularly at higher memory loads. However, we fail to observe that those with poorer memory abilities have a greater propensity for offloading or benefit more from it. Instead, our findings suggest that cognitive offloading may be a valid compensatory strategy to improve performance of memory-based tasks for individuals with a wide range of memory ability.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.