is the claim that people lean on the internet as a store of knowledge instead of holding it themselves. It has been asserted far more often than it has been pooled. A meta-analysis gathered the scattered studies and asked a different question from the usual one: not whether the effect exists, but which conditions and which people it attaches to. Who turned out most exposed?
The moderators were the real content. Across the pooled studies the Google effect went with , behavioral phenotype and , and it appeared more readily when people browsed on a mobile phone than on a computer. People with a larger were less affected than people with a smaller one. Prior internet experience strengthened the effect, and North American participants were the most susceptible group.
People increasingly reach for the web to check a fact, and the Google effect names the consequence: relying on the internet as a source of knowledge rather than remembering things oneself. The idea has circulated widely, and the literature behind it had not been pooled in any comprehensive way.
This meta-analysis set out to do that, and the interesting output is not a single effect size. It is a set of moderators. The pooled association involved cognitive load, behavioral phenotype and cognitive self-esteem, which is already a sign of how varied the measured outcomes are across the included studies.
Three moderators are worth carrying away. The effect appeared more readily on a mobile phone than on a computer. It was stronger among people who had used the internet before than among those who had not. And participants in North America came out more susceptible than those in other regions.
The fourth matters most. People with a larger knowledge base were less affected than people with a smaller one, which fits how memory works: new facts need existing structure to attach to. Read the whole review with care, though. The constructs are loose, the studies are heterogeneous, and the authors put the conclusion as a possible change in cognitive and memory mechanisms rather than as a measured loss.
wat. Offloading to a search engine bites hardest on a phone, and hardest on the people who knew least to begin with.
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The useful finding is the knowledge base. Offloading costs least to the people who already know a lot, which turns a general worry about the internet into a specific one about anybody starting from a thin foundation.
How do we know?
Gong and Yang pooled studies of intensive internet search behavior and tested moderators including device, prior internet use, size of existing knowledge base and geographical region.
What is still unknown
The pooled outcome constructs are loosely defined, the included studies differ widely in what they measured, and nothing here establishes that memory actually gets worse. The review itself puts the mechanism no more strongly than as a possibility.
Learn something?
Where to next
How does one word in a question plant a memory of something that never happened?memory
Why do we remember a long experience by only two moments of it?memory
What does your brain already know about a word that escaped you?memory