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Pushing the Boundaries of the Google Effect: The Effects of Reliability and Familiarity on Offloading

Creative Commons 'BY' version 4.0 license
Abstract

Prior research has shown that people have a better memory for facts when the fact is deleted from a computer, rather than saved. The current understanding is that we are offloading items that are saved and thus have no need to remember them. The question that remains is if there are any limitations to this phenomenon. We conducted two different experiments to explore these limits. Our first experiment looked at how the reliability of the saving system affected memory. We found a significant interaction effect that shows that this offloading effect only occurs on reliable saving systems. In experiment two, we looked at the effect of familiarity with specific topics on the offloading effect. We found that there was no interaction between familiarity and saved status. However, we did find evidence of a topic status interaction. This means that some topics were more effected by the topic type than others. These studies suggest that future experiments in the transactive memory domain need to take into account the confidence in the offloading partner and the topics that are chosen as stimuli.

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