Using digital devices can help improve memory skills, study reveals

• Outsourcing memories to a digital device could help rather than harm our memory processes, research shows
• People saved high-importance information into the device and used their own memory for less important information instead.

How is our constant use of digital devices affecting our brain health?

There is very little hard evidence to prove that technology harms or helps our ability to remember, the researchers wanted to explore whether there is any truth to the fear that overuse of digital aids can erode our memory.  

Neuroscientists have previously expressed concerns that the overuse of technology could result in the breakdown of cognitive abilities and cause “digital dementia”.

But new research by the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, showed that digital devices, such as smartphones, help people to store and remember very important information.

Using digital devices could help improve memory skills rather than causing people to become lazy or forgetful, finds a new study.

Influencing memory abilities

 “We wanted to explore how storing information in a digital device could influence memory abilities and found that when people were allowed to use external memory, the device helped them to remember the information they had saved into it. This was hardly surprising, but we also found that the device improved people’s memory for unsaved information as well,” Dr Sam Gilbert (UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience), and the senior author, said.

To demonstrate this, researchers developed a memory task to be played on a touchscreen digital tablet or computer. The test was undertaken by 158 volunteers aged between 18 and 71.

Participants were shown up to 12 numbered circles on the screen and had to remember to drag some of these to the left and some to the right.

The number of circles that they remembered to drag to the correct side determined their pay at the end of the experiment.

One side was designated ‘high value’, meaning that remembering to drag a circle to this side was worth 10 times as much money as remembering to drag a circle to the other ‘low value’ side.

Participants performed this task 16 times. They had to use their own memory to remember half of the trials and they were allowed to set reminders on the digital device for the other half.

The potential cost

The results found that participants tended to use digital devices to store the details of the high-value circles. And, when they did so, their memory for those circles was improved by 18 per cent.

Their memory for low-value circles was also improved by 27 per cent, even in people who had never set any reminders for low-value circles.

However, results also showed a potential cost of using reminders. When they were taken away, the participants remembered the low-value circles better than the high-value ones, showing that they had entrusted the high-value circles to their devices and then forgotten about them.

“This was because using the device shifted the way that people used their memory to store high-importance versus low-importance information. When people had to remember by themselves, they used their memory capacity to remember the most important information,” Gilbert said.

But when they could use the device, he said that they saved high-importance information into the device and used their own memory for less important information instead.