Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Offloading to-be-remembered information is a ubiquitous memory strategy, yet in relying on external memory stores,our ability to recall from internal memory is often diminished. In the present investigation, we examine how offloadingimpacts true and false recall. Across three preregistered experiments, participants studied and wrote word lists that wereeach strongly associated with an unstudied critical word. We compared recall in the offloading condition (i.e., when theyexpected to have access to their written lists during recall) with a no-offloading condition (i.e., when they did not expectto have access to their written lists during recall). In the absence of the written external stores, offloading decreased truerecall of the presented words while increasing false recall for the unpresented critical words. Results are discussed in termsof offloadings differential effects on the formation of gist and verbatim traces during encoding.