Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Despite the long history and pervasiveness of cognitive offloading as a memory strategy, the memorial fate of offloaded in-formation is not well understood. Recent work has suggested that offloading information may engage similar mechanismsas instructions to forget (directed forgetting). Presently, we test this prediction by examining the serial position effectfor offloaded information. Previous research has demonstrated that forget instructions can eliminate the primacy effectwhile leaving an intact recency effect. Across two experiments, participants completed multiple free recall trials using anexternal aid and then a final recall trial without the external aid. We compared a group that was expecting to use the aid forthe final trial (offloading) with a group that was not (no offloading). We found a memory impairment for offloaded itemsthat was characterized by a reduced primacy effect but intact recency effect, similar to what has been reported in researchon directed forgetting.