This is a past event
In everyday life, we often choose between accomplishing goals using unaided cognitive abilities or offloading cognitive demands onto external tools and resources. For example, to remember an upcoming appointment we might rely either on unaided memory or set a reminder such as a smartphone alert. In this talk I will review some literature on cognitive offloading and its relationship with metacognitive processes. I will also describe studies demonstrating change in cognitive offloading strategies across the lifespan. Results show that metacognitive evaluations such as feelings of confidence play a key role in determining cognitive offloading strategies. They also show that people have strong, stable biases towards external versus internal cognitive resources, which result at least in part from inaccurate metacognitive evaluations. This suggests the importance of designing metacognitive interventions that could improve individuals' adaptive use of cognitive tools.
- Speaker
- Dr Sam Gilbert
- Hosted by
- School of Psychology
- Venue
- University of Aberdeen
- Contact
-
Dr Chu or Ms Carolyn Porter (01224 272227)