The mere fact of saving some type of information such as telephone numbers, account numbers or any relevant data for us in a file on our computer, for example, can improve our current memory . This is the conclusion of the latest study by a team of researchers from the University of California in Santa Cruz (USA) and which is collected by the journal Psychological Science .
According to the work, this act of saving thanks to files backed up on another device, helps to free up cognitive resources that can be used to remember new information . “Our results show that people are significantly better at learning and remembering new information when they save old information,” says study leader Benjamin Storm.
For their experiment, the scientists enlisted 20 college students who were asked to open a pair of PDF files, file A and file B. Each PDF contained a list of 10 common names. They were given 20 seconds to study file A before closing it. And then they had to do the same with B. Half of the volunteers were asked to save the file in a certain place and the other half were only ordered to simply close the file when the time had passed. The researchers found that the students who were asked to save the file remembered many more words from the PDFs than those who had closed the file at a glance . These results were confirmed with a second study with 48 participants.
Contrary to the thought that storing data in a computer causes us worse memory, this study has shown that this is not the case: when our brain knows that we can access that information digitally, it reassigns these cognitive resources to tasks other than maintenance of that information, but to remember new information
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“We tend to think of forgetting as it happens when memory fails, but research suggests that forgetting plays an essential role in supporting adaptive functioning of memory and cognition, ” Storm clarifies.
“As technology develops, computers and smartphones are making it easier to store information, and this appears to have important consequences for the way our memory works . By treating computers and other digital devices as extensions of memory, people can protect themselves from the costs of forgetting while reaping the benefits of technology, ”Storm details.
