Designing a space for easy cognitive offloading
- Extended mind: the mind does not exclusively reside in the brain or even the body, but extends into the physical world
- Active externalism: objects in the environment which function as part of the mind
- Cognitive offloading strategies?
- Cognitive offloading domains
- Types of cognitive demands
- Memory, attention, problem solving, emotions, imagination, self control, spirituality, social cognition
Notes
- the benefits of cognitive offloading (being able to readily get information out of your head)
- ex. offloading frees up mental resources for higher order thinking about that material
- ex. detachment game
- how it creates what psychologists might call "a different set of affordances" for your thoughts
- you can relate to that thought differently on paper than in your head
- Affordance: perceived use cases, or ways of interacting with something
- A study done at Harvard in 2011 found that when people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall for the information itself and higher recall for where they can access it
Confidence guides spontaneous cognitive offloading - Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications
Background Cognitive offloading is the use of physical action to reduce the cognitive demands of a task. Everyday memory relies heavily on this practice; for example, when we write down to-be-remembered information or use diaries, alerts, and reminders to trigger delayed intentions. A key goal of recent research has been to investigate the processes that trigger cognitive offloading.
cognitiveresearchjournal.springeropen.com
Cognitive offloading is the use of physical action to reduce the cognitive demands of a task
- Everyday memory relies heavily on this practice
- Research has demonstrated that individuals decide whether or not to offload based on a potentially erroneous metacognitive evaluation of their mental abilities
- Improving the accuracy of metacognitive evaluations may help to optimise offloading behaviour
- Metacognition (confidence in unaided memory ability) guided both instructed and spontaneous offloading: Participants in both groups set more reminders when they were less confident (regardless of actual memory ability)
- A key finding is that people decide whether they need reminders based on how good they think their memory is, regardless of how good it objectively is. Therefore, if we can improve people's insight into their memory, they might compensate more effectively by offloading when needed.
- Both, instructed and spontaneous offloading was guided by confidence.
- Prospective memory: memory for delayed intentions
- Participants offloaded more often when the task was more difficult; for example, when there were three intentions to remember rather than one, or when they were asked a distracting arithmetic question between encoding an intention and executing it.
- Dunn and Risko (2016) found evidence that perceived difficulty influenced the decision to offload. The authors used a reading task in which the test was sometimes tilted to one side. Participants could offload the demand for mental rotation by physically tilting their head. They tended to do so more in a condiyion they perceived as more difficult, not necessarily the condition that was objectively more difficult.
- Metacognitive beliefs could be a target for interventions which could improve individuals' adaptive use of external cognitive resources. For example, prospective-memory abilities might be improved not only by directly retraining the memory and executive functions components that allow the fulfilment of delayed intentions., but also by improving people's insight into their own memory performance to then compensate by cognitively offloading where needed.
- The lower people's confidence was in their unaided ability to perform the task, the more likely they offloaded by setting reminders instead of solely relying on their own internal memory
- A wealth of studies has accrued that suggests that people possess good metacognitive insight into heir decisions and memory
- Research on ageing or brain injury traditionally deals with memory impairments and how they can be ameliorated. Memory aids, such as reminders, play a key role in this line of research; for example, review a range of studies that suggests that there is higher use of memory aids in older people presumably because they have insight into their declining memory abilities. Lovelace an Twohig (1990) found a clear increase in the use of external aids with age, such as calendars, but no increase in the use of internal memory strategies, such as mental retracing.
- The literature on brain injuries has studied how external reminders can support patients in their everyday life.
- Could correcting possible overconfidence biases make people more prone to rely on external aids? Future studies should test whether confidence could be directly manipulated to increase or decrease reminder use where needed.
Brainstorming
- Potential problem for giving your brain too easy of a way out