THE SAVING-ENHANCED MEMORY EFFECT FOR SPATIAL RELATIONSHIPS

Abstract

One common method for enhancing our memory abilities is "cognitive offloading," which is the use of external resources to make cognitive tasks easier, like storing telephone numbers in your smartphone (Risko & Gilbert, 2016). One consequence of this type of cognitive offloading is the "saving-enhanced memory effect," which is the idea that having an external backup of information can free up cognitive resources and facilitate the learning and retention of new information. In the original study that explored this effect, participants learned pairs of words lists on a computer and were tested on their memory for both lists. Critically, when they saved the first list in a desktop folder, they remembered more words from the second list than when they deleted the first word list before studying the second one (Storm & Stone, 2015). Flusberg and Ramos (2018) replicated this effect outside of the digital realm, using physical copies of word lists stored in a manila folder or destroyed in a paper shredder. To date, however, the saving-enhanced memory effect has only been demonstrated for memory using linguistic stimuli. The present study tested whether this same effect can be applied to memory for spatial relationships as well. We replicated the basic design of Flusberg and Ramos (2018), replacing the word list stimuli with a series of grids containing stickers in different locations which participants had to learn. The results showed no statistically significant evidence of a saving-enhanced memory effect for spatial relationships, which may suggest that this effect is only present for linguistic information.