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Results: Behaviors and Experiences with Internal and External Memory

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Memory and Technology

Abstract

In this chapter, we continue reporting the results of our comprehensive survey study on the interplay of internal and external memory in everyday life and how that is changing in the early twenty-first century (N = 476 Mechanical Turk participants). We report the descriptive statistics for questions about behaviors and experiences with internal memory and external memory. Specific topics include low-tech strategies, taking notes, reasons for external memory retrieval failures, passwords, phone numbers, backup practices, social media, and photos. Overall, results show that, for many, technology plays a large and increasing role in supporting human memory. We also introduce a distinction between episodic external memory and semantic external memory, which we will further address in Chapters 4 and 8.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Q31 asked about “shopping lists” which we intended to mean lists written on paper (low-tech) but which could also have been interpreted as lists on a device such as a mobile phone (high-tech).

  2. 2.

    Q106: Two participants claimed to have had a cellular/mobile phone for an impossible number of years (greater than their age and earlier than mobile phones were widely available, which was the early 1980s). Their data were excluded from analyses for just the questions in this section.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Behavioral Sciences, Fontbonne University, St. Louis, MO, USA

    Jason R. Finley

  2. Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY, USA

    Farah Naaz

  3. Department of Psychology, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Lincoln, NE, USA

    Francine W. Goh

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  1. Jason R. Finley
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  2. Farah Naaz
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  3. Francine W. Goh
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Finley, J.R., Naaz, F., Goh, F.W. (2018). Results: Behaviors and Experiences with Internal and External Memory. In: Memory and Technology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99169-6_3

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