Notes on the Benefits of Cognitive Offloading
One who cannot find their car keys may claim that they are plagued by forgetting. One who is involved in a recent break-up, however, may claim that they are plagued by remembering. While most laypeople agree that memory does not work like it should, most psychologists argue that it does: memory serves an adaptive function. Regardless, everyone can at least agree that certain aspects of cognition are preferred in certain contexts over others. We would all like to remember when we want to remember, and forget when we want to forget.
If given the chance, would people strategically employ features of cognition to best serve their current desires? We need not look far to find an answer to such a question. Memory is often reconstructed to reflect current cognitive states. Research on confirmation bias, egocentric distortion, and false eye-witness testimony, for example, provide evidence to suggest that, yes, people often remember how they want to remember. Unfortunately, these phenomena describe memory processes that may lay outside of conscious control, and thus, do not lend themselves to exploitation. How then, can people exert conscious control over unconscious processes to best serve their current purposes? Presumably, overt aspects of cognition, like thought or action, can be used to modulate the extent to which conscious processes influence unconscious processes.
An example of such an overt behavior is cognitive offloading. When employed strategically, offloading can afford certain cognitive benefits. Saving personal contacts into a cellular phone or creating reminders on a calendar, for example, provide ways in which people outsource the burden of remembering onto the environment. Presumably, this behavior serves an adaptive function: by storing information in the environment, resources that would otherwise be used to maintain that information in memory can be allocated toward other cognitive processes. Cognitive offloading, then, may offer a way for people to exert authority over how to use conscious processes (planning and prioritizing) to influence unconscious processes (forgetting).
In other contexts, offloading can offer similar assistance to cognition. Konrad, Tucker, Crane, and Whittaker (2016) suggest that offloading can help promote personal well-being and maintain a positive sense of self. Other research suggests that people not only focus on remembering positive aspects of their lives, but that they utilize digital devices to perpetuate and conserve this ‘rosy view’ in memory (Konrad, Isaacs, and Whittaker, 2016). In this context, offloading can serve another adaptive function: emotion regulation.
Perhaps, cognitive offloading is being used to enhance favorable aspects of cognition while reducing the extent to which negative aspects interfere with cognition. If forgetting is a problem, we can use the environment to remind us. If a memory is interfering with our emotional well-being, we can gain closure by writing and reflecting. Thus, cognitive functions that can be offloaded, will be, so that other functions can be optimized to help accomplish current goals.
To elaborate on this last point, consider how people tend to forget negative aspects of their lives more quickly than they do positive aspects (fading-affect bias). This process also seems to be adaptive: forgetting negative experiences allows people to effectively maintain their emotional well-being. In addition, consider contexts where people utilize their environments, whether digital or not, to present positive views of themselves. People show-case their identities in their rooms (Gosling et al., 2002), use mementos to savor the past (Bryant et al., 2005), and exhibit positive aspects of their lives to each other on Facebook (Gonzales & Hancock, 2011). By using the environment to selectively maintain positive aspects of the self, people choose to feed their ‘online’ cognitive systems with biased ‘offline’ representations of their lives—making favorable aspects of the self more memorable than unfavorable aspects.
Strategic offloading, therefore, may serve to enhance certain unconscious processes and, in doing so, aid cognition in many, unprecedented ways.
References
Bryant, F. B., Smart, C. M., & King, S. P. (2005). Using the past to enhance the present: Boosting happiness through positive reminiscence. Journal of Happiness Studies, 6(3), 227-260.
Gonzales, A. L., & Hancock, J. T. (2011). Mirror, mirror on my Facebook wall: Effects of exposure to Facebook on self-esteem. Cyberpsychology, behavior, and social networking, 14(1-2), 79-83.
Gosling, S. D., Ko, S. J., Mannarelli, T., & Morris, M. E. (2002). A room with a cue: personality judgments based on offices and bedrooms. Journal of personality and social psychology, 82(3), 379.
Konrad, A., Isaacs, E., & Whittaker, S. (2016). Technology-mediated memory: is technology altering our memories and interfering with well-being?. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), 23(4), 1-29.
Konrad, A., Tucker, S., Crane, J., & Whittaker, S. (2016). Technology and reflection: Mood and memory mechanisms for well-being. Psychology of well-being, 6(1), 5.