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Abstract
Young and older adults benefit from using cognitive offloading – defined as the use of physical action to reduce internal cognitive demand – to perform memory-based tasks. People also report frequent use of cognitive offloading in everyday life. In daily life, however, to-be-remembered information often varies in value, and prior work indicates that older adults can maintain valuable information in internal memory just as well as young adults. This suggests that one effective way to engage cognitive offloading would be to offload less valuable information and dedicate internal cognitive resources to remembering more valuable information. To date, research investigating the use and benefits afforded by offloading a subset of to-be-remembered information (i.e., partial offloading) is limited and questions remain surrounding the influence of value and experience on partial offloading behaviors and benefits in young and older adults. Thus, the goal of the present investigation was to better understand if and how young and older adults’ offloading behaviors and the benefits conferred by partial offloading changed following direct instruction and extended practice. Young (17 – 30) and older adults (60 - 91) studied lists of words that varied in objective value under both internal memory and partial offloading conditions. In Experiment 1, participants chose a subset of words to offload both before and after receiving direct instruction to offload low, medium, and high-value words in three separate trials. In Experiment 2, participants received extended practice with partial offloading across three trials. In both experiments, participants received feedback about their performance after each memory test including the number of points earned on each trial. Across experiments, gaining experience with partial offloading improved overall performance on a memory-based task where information differs in value for both young and older adults.
