Collaborative Innovation Center of Assessment toward Basic Education Quality, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China; Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, University College London, London, United Kingdom.
Collaborative Innovation Center of Assessment toward Basic Education Quality, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China.
Cognition. 2019 Dec;193:104012. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2019.104012. Epub 2019 Jul 1.
Cognitive offloading refers to our reliance on the external environment in order to reduce cognitive demand. For instance, people write notes on paper or smartphones in order not to forget shopping lists or upcoming appointments. A plausible hypothesis is that such offloading relies on metamemory - our confidence in our future memory performance. However, this hypothesis has not been directly tested, and it remains unclear when and how people use external sources to aid their encoding and retrieval of information. In four experiments, here we asked participants to learn word pairs and decide whether to offload some of the pairs by "saving" them on a computer. In the memory test, they had the opportunity to use this saved information on half of trials. Participants adaptively saved the most difficult items and used this offloaded information to boost their memory performance. Crucially, participants' confidence judgments about their memory predicted their decisions to use the saved information, indicating that cognitive offloading is associated with metacognitive evaluation about memory performance. These findings were accommodated by a Bayesian computational model in which beliefs about the performance boost gained from using offloaded information are negatively coupled to an evaluation of memory ability. Together our findings highlight a close link between metamemory and cognitive offloading.
认知减负是指我们依赖外部环境来减少认知需求。例如，人们会在纸上或智能手机上写购物清单或待办事项，以避免遗忘。一个合理的假设是，这种减负依赖于元记忆——我们对未来记忆表现的信心。然而，这一假设尚未得到直接验证，人们何时以及如何利用外部资源来辅助信息的编码和提取仍不清楚。在四项实验中，我们要求参与者学习单词对，并决定是否通过在计算机上“保存”一些对来减轻认知负担。在记忆测试中，他们有机会在一半的试次中使用保存的信息。参与者自适应地保存最困难的项目，并利用这些减负信息来提高记忆表现。至关重要的是，参与者对记忆表现的信心判断预测了他们使用保存信息的决策，这表明认知减负与对记忆表现的元认知评估有关。贝叶斯计算模型可以解释这些发现，该模型认为，使用减负信息带来的表现提升的信念与对记忆能力的评估呈负相关。这些发现表明，元记忆和认知减负之间存在密切联系。
