Psychology

Human cognitive neuroscience seminar

Speaker: Professor Bob Logie

Title: Cognitive offloading: Why digital memory is bad for your brain

Abstract: With the dramatic increase in use of digital technologies in everyday working and personal life, there is an increasing reliance on digital memory to store important information rather than to store that information in our biological memory. In recent years, this has been described as ‘cognitive offloading’, which can be beneficial for storing details, appointments, and to give access to vast amounts of information on the world-wide web, thereby freeing up brain capacity. However, a major question is whether that brain capacity is used productively in other ways, or if we offload more than is desirable. This talk will present recent evidence demonstrating that there are major disadvantages in letting our smart phones do our thinking for us, and because digital memory is readily available, this undermines learning. At university, this means that having digital recordings of lectures may lead to much less effective learning, and availability of digital collections of lecture slides gives the illusion that material has been learned when it has not, or learning is delayed until just before exams. The talk will conclude that the learning that is required at university is undermined by making too much lecture material available digitally, and will use the understanding of, and evidence for how human learning and memory actually works to demonstrate how to maximise effective and low-stress learning through use of digital memory as a prompt for biological recall, not as a means to achieve cognitive offloading.

Contact

The seminars are organised by the Human Cognitive Neuroscience research group. For further information, or if you would like to join the e-mail list for these seminars, please email Ed Silson.

Ed Silson

Human cognitive neuroscience

 

Oct 24 2018 -

Human cognitive neuroscience seminar

2018-10-24: Cognitive offloading: Why digital memory is bad for your brain

Lecture Theatre F21, Psychology Building, 7 George Square, Edinburgh, EH8 9JZ