Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

People frequently offload cognitive tasks onto the environment by,for example, digitally storing information they want to rememberlater. This frees up cognitive resources, leading to an increasedability to learn new information (the “Saving-Enhanced MemoryEffect”). We tested whether this effect would generalize beyondthe digital realm. On every trial, participants studied two printedlists of words before being tested on their memory for both lists.For half the trials, participants shredded the first list beforeattempting to learn the second one. For the remaining trials, theysaved the first word list in a folder before learning the second list.Results revealed a robust Saving-Enhanced Memory Effect, aspeople remembered more words on average from the second listwhen they had saved the initial word list. These findings suggestthat the effects of offloading memories onto the external world aresimilar for information stored in digital and physical formats.