Richmond Lauren L, Burnett Lois K, Kearley Julia, Gilbert Sam J, Morrison Alexandra B, Ball B Hunter
Department of Psychology, Stony Brook University, Psychology B Building, Stony Brook, NY 11794-2500, USA.
Department of Psychology, McGill University, 2001 McGill College Ave., Montreal, Quebec H3A 1G1, Canada.
J Mem Lang. 2025 Apr;142. doi: 10.1016/j.jml.2025.104617. Epub 2025 Jan 23.
Prior research focused on the relationship between cognitive offloading and working memory ability in the prospective and retrospective memory domains have produced conflicting results. Specifically, past work in the prospective memory domain has found that individuals with lower working memory capacity (WMC) choose to offload more often and benefit more from offloading than those with higher WMC (Ball, Peper, et al., 2022) while work in the retrospective memory domain has not found a relationship between WMC and the use of or benefit from offloading (Morrison & Richmond, 2020). However, task design across studies differed in several other respects aside from memory domain, making it difficult to discern whether different mechanisms underlie cognitive offloading across domains. The current study aimed to address these discrepancies by introducing similar procedures across offloading tasks. Results revealed that when offloading was required or permitted, participants with varying levels of WMC generally performed more similarly to one another than when the task had to be completed using internal memory alone. In addition, participants with lower WMC generally benefitted more from offloading, particularly under high memory load, compared to those with higher WMC when offloading was required and when participants had free choice about whether and when to engage in offloading. However, neither metacognitive underconfidence in internal memory capability nor lower WMC estimates were associated with increased offloading frequency in either memory domain when participants were permitted to offload. Practical and theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.
先前关于前瞻性和回顾性记忆领域中认知卸载与工作记忆能力之间关系的研究得出了相互矛盾的结果。具体而言，过去在前瞻性记忆领域的研究发现，工作记忆容量（WMC）较低的个体比WMC较高的个体更频繁地选择卸载，并且从卸载中获益更多（鲍尔、佩珀等人，2022年），而在回顾性记忆领域的研究尚未发现WMC与卸载的使用或从中获得的益处之间存在关联（莫里森和里士满，2020年）。然而，除了记忆领域之外，各研究的任务设计在其他几个方面也存在差异，这使得难以辨别不同领域的认知卸载是否存在不同的机制。当前的研究旨在通过在卸载任务中引入相似的程序来解决这些差异。结果显示，当需要或允许进行卸载时，与仅使用内部记忆完成任务相比，不同WMC水平的参与者之间的表现通常更为相似。此外，与WMC较高的参与者相比，WMC较低的参与者通常从卸载中获益更多，尤其是在高记忆负荷下，无论是在需要卸载时，还是在参与者可以自由选择是否以及何时进行卸载时。然而，当允许参与者进行卸载时，在任何一个记忆领域中，对内部记忆能力的元认知过度不自信或较低的WMC估计值均与卸载频率增加无关。本文讨论了这些发现的实际意义和理论意义。
