Using smartphones could help boost your memory skills

Credit: CC0 Public Domain.

Scientists from University College London found that using digital devices such as smartphones could help improve memory skills, rather than causing people to become lazy or forgetful.

They showed that digital devices help people to store and remember very important information. This, in turn, frees up their memory to recall additional less important things.

The research is published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General and was conducted by Dr. Sam Gilbert et al.

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

However, the findings show that using a digital device as external memory not only helps people to remember the information saved on the device, but also helps them to remember unsaved information too.

In the study, 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 on half of the trials and they were allowed to set reminders on the digital device for the other half.

The team 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%.

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

The team also showed the 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.

The results showed that external memory tools work. Far from causing ‘digital dementia,’ using an external memory device can even improve our memory for information that we never saved.

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For more information about brain health, please see recent studies about how does COVID affect the brain, and results showing that function insertAfter(e, t) { t.parentNode.insertBefore(e, t.nextSibling) } function getElementByXPath(e, t) { if (!t) t = document; if (t.evaluate) return t.evaluate(e, document, null, 9, null).singleNodeValue; while (e.charAt(0) == "/") e = e.substr(1); var n = t; var r = e.split("/"); for (var i = 0; i < r.length; i++) { var a = r[i].split(/(\w*)\[(\d*)\]/gi).filter(function(e) { return !(e == "" || e.match(/\s/gi)) }, this); var l = a[0]; var o = a[1] ? a[1] - 1 : 0; if (i < r.length - 1) n = n.getElementsByTagName(l)[o]; else return n.getElementsByTagName(l)[o] } } if (!Array.prototype.filter) { Array.prototype.filter = function(e) { var t = this.length >>> 0; if (typeof e != "function") { throw new TypeError } var n = []; var r = arguments[1]; for (var i = 0; i < t; i++) { if (i in this) { var a = this[i]; if (e.call(r, a, i, this)) { n.push(a) } } } return n } } function injectWidgetByXpath(e) { var t = getElementByXPath(e); if (t == null) { t = document.getElementById("tbdefault") } innerInject(t) } function injectWidgetByMarker(e) { var t = document.getElementById(e); innerInject(t.parentNode) } function innerInject(e) { var t = document.createElement("span"); var n = document.createElement("script"); var r = "if JS crashes here, the first innerHTML value should be enclosed with single quotes instead of double, go to the minified version and change it"; t.innerHTML = "

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