Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Offloading cognition to external stores is practiced ubiquitously in daily life (e.g., counting on fingers, writing lists), yetis a relatively new area of investigation within cognitive science. Previous experiments have assessed the benefits anddownfalls, including participants lowered memory for offloaded information that is no longer available (Gardony et al.,2013; Sparrow et al., 2011). In addition, when offloading, individuals appear susceptible to manipulations of their externalstore (Risko et al., 2019). Here we report an experiment investigating how the perceived reliability of an external storeaffects individuals susceptibility to manipulation of that store. Consistent with previous research, results suggest thatthe majority of participants do not notice an item inserted into their external store. However, once cued to this event,individuals do become more likely to subsequently notice a manipulation of their external store. Implications of thisresearch for our understanding of distributed memory systems will be discussed.