With the continued integration of technology into people's lives, saving digital information has become an everyday facet of human behavior. In the present research, we examined the consequences of saving certain information on the ability to learn and remember other information. Results from three experiments showed that saving one file before studying a new file significantly improved memory for the contents of the new file. Notably, this effect was not observed when the saving process was deemed unreliable or when the contents of the to-be-saved file were not substantial enough to interfere with memory for the new file. These results suggest that saving provides a means to strategically off-load memory onto the environment in order to reduce the extent to which currently unneeded to-be-remembered information interferes with the learning and remembering of other information.
The ways in which people learn, remember, and solve problems have all been impacted by the Internet. The present research explored how people become primed to use the Internet as a form of cognitive offloading. In three experiments, we show that using the Internet to retrieve information alters a person's propensity to use the Internet to retrieve other information. Specifically, participants who used Google to answer an initial set of difficult trivia questions were more likely to decide to use Google when answering a new set of relatively easy trivia questions than were participants who answered the initial questions from memory. These results suggest that relying on the Internet to access information makes one more likely to rely on the Internet to access other information.
A deep-sea core collected on the continental slope off northern California contains a pollen stratigraphy for the past 20,000 yr that can be correlated to the pollen stratigraphy from the upper section of Clear Lake core CL-73-4. The occurrence in one sequence of pollen, reflecting the local continental paleoclimates, and marine microfossils reflecting the local paleoceanography, allows a comparison of concurrent responses of the local ocean and adjacent continental area to global climate changes. The interpretation of the two data sets gives a complex progression of changes that are probably interrelated, such as upwelling that produced coastal fogs. The changes in climatic and oceanographic environmental conditions that occurred in response to the switch from global glacial to interglacial conditions was not a smooth progression of increasingly moderate regimes; rather, the changes appear to be a complicated series of states that suggests a disequilibrium mode lasting from about 15,000 to 5,000 yr ago. 171 172 J. V. Gardner and Others Wl pj\ / I ARENAljG.A/?CM RIVER STUDY V
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.