The benefits and potential costs of cognitive offloading for retrospective information

Abstract

Remembering past information (such as recalling the items needed for a favourite recipe while at the grocery store) can sometimes be difficult. To support such retrospective memory-based tasks in everyday life, people engage in cognitive offloading, defined as the use of physical action (such as writing a shopping list) to reduce internal memory demand. In this Review, we summarize the literature on cognitive offloading for retrospective memory-based tasks. Although laboratory studies have demonstrated that cognitive offloading has benefits for task performance, it is not without costs. For example, unexpectedly losing access to offloaded notes results in poorer performance than relying on internal memory alone. We also consider factors that might lead to variability in the use and benefits of cognitive offloading, such as working memory capacity and age. Indeed, given that older adults exhibit poorer performance in some aspects of retrospective memory than young adults, this group might especially benefit from cognitive offloading in everyday life. Future research should focus on better understanding how, for whom, and under what conditions offloading improves performance to provide maximal benefits while also minimizing the costs associated with cognitive offloading in real-world settings.