Does my smartphone remember everything I need to remember? : A quantitative study on distributed cognition and how memory is affected by technical artifacts.

Sammanfattning: Technical artifacts, such as smartphones, computers, search engines and computer programs are extensively used by the modern human. It seems like people use these artifacts to remember important information and become better at finding information effectively with them as a constant available aid. This study aims to explore the possibility that human memory sieves away information that is saved in a database and instead focuses on remembering how to get access to the needed information. More precisely this paper aims to examine if people do focus on the content of information or where information is to be found. The motivation of the study was to investigate if smartphones can bring positive outcomes to human cognitive processes and if modern humans are adapting to the technical world. The present study is a replication of Sparrow et al.’s (2011) original study, which presents findings that suggest that humans remember things they know they have access to less than information they do not have access to. Two research questions were investigated in the present study through an experiment, conducted with university students at Linköping University as test participants. The experiment investigated if the participants focused on remembering the content of presented statements, or remembering if the statements were about to be saved or deleted after being exposed to them. The result presented nostatistically significance. Conclusively it is recommended to continue with further studies on the subject and to conduct more replication of Sparrow et al.’s original study, due to the conflicting findings. A speculation is that a cause for the lacking significant result is the relatively small sample size, and future studies are therefore recommended to test a greater number of test participants. Despite the result it is possible that humans use technical artefacts to enhance cognitive processes, and use smartphones as a transactive memory partners, due to the extensive use of technical artifacts and the original study’s findings.