CogBlog – A Cognitive Psychology Blog

Do you know the capital of Indonesia? Or who the 11^th President of the United States was? Perhaps, instead, you could tell me what arachibutyrophobia is?

Don’t know something? Well…

No? Well, that’s okay. I mean, what’s the point of knowing stuff like geography or US history when you have all that information at the tips of your fingers? Maybe you won’t place first in your school’s trivia contest or apply to be on Jeopardy, but who cares, you can just Google it!

A long, long time ago, searching for information wasn’t so easy. People had to look through encyclopedias, dictionaries, and maps (ugh, can you imagine?) to figure out information that these days, we can find within seconds. Thanks to the previous work of dozens of brilliant scientists, the world was forever changed with Tim Berners-Lee’s invention of the World Wide Web. What is fascinating is that in just the short amount of time that the Internet has been available, the human mind has already begun to develop and work in synergy with this technology. One of the most prevalent ways in which we see this is the Google effect. That’s right, an important cognitive bias was actually named after the world’s most popular search engine – and for good reason!

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Have you ever been in a lecture where you are stuck vigorously writing down notes for the entire class and asked yourself if the way you are taking notes is the best use of your time? Bui, Myerson, and Hale conducted a series of three experiments examining note-taking strategies, specifically hand-written vs. computer typed, and their relation to recall and memory.  With approximately 83% of college instructors teaching in a lecture environment (Wirt et al. 2001), proper note taking is a beneficial skill to have when it comes to learning at higher levels of academia like undergraduate and graduate institutions.

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