ArticleCognitive research: principles and implications2021
Individual differences in cognitive offloading: a comparison of intention offloading, pattern copy, and short-term memory capacity.
Article in Cognitive research: principles and implications, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Meta-analytic investigations of the effect of cognitive offloading on memory-based task performance and interindividual variability.Memory & cognition · 2026Pooled it
- Shifting reliance between the internal and external world: A meta-analysis on visual-working memory use.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Pooled it
- Stable tendencies in spontaneous working memory usage during flexible behaviour.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Article
- Information overload, cognitive fusion, and health literacy among individuals with type 2 diabetes: a moderated network analysis.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Reappearing sensory input guides visual working memory prioritization.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2025Article
- Can you help me? Using others to offload cognition.Memory & cognition · 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
- Outsourcing Memory to External Tools: A Review of 'Intention Offloading'.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2023Review
- Framing cognitive offloading in terms of gains or losses: achieving a more optimal use of reminders.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2022Article
- Supporting Cognition With Modern Technology: Distributed Cognition Today and in an AI-Enhanced Future.Frontiers in artificial intelligence · 2022Article
- Consequences of cognitive offloading: Boosting performance but diminishing memory.Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006) · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The cognitive load of many everyday life tasks exceeds known limitations of short-term memory. One strategy to compensate for information overload is cognitive offloading which refers to the externalization of cognitive processes such as reminder setting instead of memorizing. There appears to be remarkable variance in offloading behavior between participants which poses the question whether there is a common factor influencing offloading behavior across different tasks tackling short-term memory processes. To pursue this question, we studied individual differences in offloading behavior between two well-established offloading paradigms: the intention offloading task which tackles memory for intentions and the pattern copy task which tackles continuous short-term memory load. Our study also included an unrelated task measuring short-term memory capacity. Each participant completed all tasks twice on two consecutive days in order to obtain reliability scores. Despite high reliability scores, individual differences in offloading behavior were uncorrelated between the two offloading tasks. In both tasks, however, individual differences in offloading behavior were correlated with the individual differences in an unrelated short-term memory task. Our results therefore show that offloading behavior cannot simply be explained in terms of a single common factor driving offloading behavior across tasks. We discuss the implications of this finding for future research investigating the interrelations of offloading behavior across different tasks.
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