October 26, 2024, 8:43 am | Read time: 4 minutes
The once “uncharted territory of the internet” has rapidly become an integral part of everyday life. Accordingly, there is great interest in investigating its effects on people. And these are not – as one might intuitively assume – all negative. FITBOOK editor Sophie Brünke presents a study that came to the conclusion that Internet use can improve memory performance.
Cooking recipes, train connections, job offers – all things that are primarily researched on the internet these days. Despite its crucial role in society, it is still unknown how the heavy use of the internet can affect human cognition, especially episodic memory. That’s why two scientists investigated the effects using data from over 36,000 participants from the UK.
Overview
How memory works
People store conscious, retrievable content in their memory. Medical professionals categorize it into episodic and semantic memory. Episodic memory stores autobiographical knowledge, such as knowledge about oneself, events and relationships between events. Semantic memory, on the other hand, is responsible for facts. This is where learned knowledge is stored, e.g., from school, which is not dependent on specific events.1
The authors of the study describe the internet as a form of transactive memory (shared knowledge system of a group). This is because there is evidence that information from the internet can influence memory processes. Past research has shown that Internet users are more likely to remember the way in which they can access the information they need than the information itself.2 For example, someone may remember less about the instructions of a cooking tutorial (semantic memory), but exactly how they can retrieve this information again (episodic memory). As a result, people are relying more and more on the internet for information.3
Study surveyed the frequency of internet use
The study’s objective was to understand the impact of daily internet use on episodic memory. For this purpose, the study authors used a data set of 36,542 participants from the British Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS), which was collected between 2011 and 2012. Women made up 44 percent of the participants. The average age of the participants was 47, with the youngest being 28 and the oldest 65 years old.
Participants self-reported their frequency of internet use. There was a choice of:
- “Daily”
- “Several times a week”
- “Several times a month”
- “Several times per year”
- “Less than once a month”
- “Never/no access”
The study authors also used interviews to assess the episodic memory of each participant. For this purpose, the test subjects were given ten words by a computer. After they had heard them all, the participants were allowed to tell their interview partner the words they had memorized (immediate recall). They then took a number sequence test before sharing the memorized words again (delayed recall). As control variables, the study authors used demographic characteristics of the participants, including age, gender, monthly income, highest level of education, marital status and place of residence.
Those who used the internet daily had a better memory
The analysis of the collected data showed that the frequency of internet use had a significant effect on episodic memory. This was also the case when the scientists took demographic characteristics into account. Daily internet users performed best in both immediate and delayed recall.
The less often participants spent time online, the clearer the differences in their memory performance became. When daily users were compared with those who were online several times a week, the mean values of their measured immediate memory performance differed by a value of 0.07. In comparison with people who never use the internet, the difference in memory performance amounted to an impressive 0.55.
The scientists found the same for delayed recall. Here, the mean values of the memory performance of daily users and those who use the internet several times a week differed by 0.05. Here too, the difference increased with decreasing Internet use. The mean memory performance of daily users was 0.49 higher than that of never users.
“Use it or lose it”
The study suggests that the internet functions as a transactive memory system, activating episodic memory when individuals attempt to recall the location of external information. Internet use is positively associated with episodic memory, as it promotes more frequent use of the episodic form of memory. This observation also supports the “use it or lose it” theory. According to this theory, the consistent practice of a skill enhances its performance.
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Classification of the study
It should be noted that this study has a cross-sectional design. This means that no causal relationship can be proven. Does frequent internet use really improve episodic memory or do people with better episodic memory use the internet more often?
The scientists also point out that internet use serves two main purposes: social communication and information acquisition. Future longitudinal studies should distinguish between these two purposes to more accurately assess the internet’s impact on memory.