Toward a Metacognitive Account of Cognitive Offloading

Judgments of effort and associated cues are influenced by stimulus context

The experience of cognitive effort is ubiquitous as well as influential; however, our understanding of how judgments of effort are influenced by contextual change is currently limited. Recent work has suggested that explicit cue reports immediately after provision of judgments of effort are sensitive to the evaluation context in which the judgment is made (Ashburner & Risko, 2022). We extend this research here by examining whether a "mixed" vs. "pure" stimulus context (i.e., experience with multiple stimulus types vs. a single stimulus type) would also influence judgments of effort. Furthermore, using explicit cue reports, we investigated whether the cues used to make these judgments were likewise influenced by the stimulus context. Results demonstrated that the pattern of effort judgments and the explicit cue reports changed markedly across stimulus context. Implications of these results in terms of better understanding how individuals make judgments of effort are discussed.

The development of social offloading

Across two experiments, we explored the conditions under which 4- to 11-year-old children (N = 138) were more likely to seek social cognitive helpers and whether they preferentially relied on help from those that had previously shown proficiency in a relevant cognitive context. Children completed a memory task with varying levels of difficulty, after which they were introduced to two characters that exhibited either a high memory ability (task-relevant) or a high motor skill ability (task-irrelevant) in a distinct context. Children then completed the memory task a second time with the option to choose one of the two characters to assist them. From 6 years of age, children preferentially offloaded memory demand onto the character that had previously demonstrated a high memory ability and were also more likely to ask for help on difficult trials compared with easy trials. Our results also indicated potential differences in factors influencing children's social and nonsocial cognitive offloading decisions.

Can you help me? Using others to offload cognition

One of the most ancient and widely used forms of cognitive offloading is the outsourcing of cognitive operations onto other humans. Here, we explore whether humans preferentially seek out and use information from more competent compared with less competent others in an ongoing cognitive task. Participants (N = 120) completed a novel computerised visuospatial working memory task where each trial required them to remember either one, five, or ten target locations and recall them after a brief delay. Next, participants watched two virtual people compete in a distinct memory game, where one performed relatively well, demonstrating a stronger memory, and the other performed relatively poorly, demonstrating a weaker memory. Finally, participants completed the initial memory task again, but this time, either the strong-memory person or the weak-memory person was available to help with recall on each trial. Our results showed that, through observation and without direct instruction, participants acquired beliefs about the virtual people's cognitive proficiencies and could readily draw upon these beliefs to inform offloading decisions. Participants were typically more likely to ask for help from the strong-memory person, and this tendency was independent from other factors known to drive cognitive offloading more generally, like task difficulty, unaided cognitive ability, and metacognitive confidence.

How attention and working memory work together in the pursuit of goals: The development of the sampling-remembering trade-off

Most work in the last 50 years on visual working memory and attention has used a classic psychophysical setup: participants are instructed to attend to, or remember, a set of items. This setup sidesteps the role of cognitive control; effort is maximal, tasks are simple, and strategies are limited. While this approach has yielded important insights, it provides no clear path toward an integrative theory (Kristjánsson & Draschkow, 2021) and, like studying a town's walkability by having its college students run the 50-yard dash, it runs the danger of focusing on edge cases. Here, in this theoretical opinion article, we argue for an approach where dynamic relationships between the agent and the environment are understood functionally, in light of an agent's goals. This means a shift in emphasis from the performance of the mechanisms underlying a narrow task ("remember these items!") to their control in pursuit of a naturalistic goal ("make a sandwich!", Land & Hayhoe, 2001). Here, we highlight the sampling-remembering trade-off between exploiting goal-relevant information in the environment versus maintaining it in working memory. We present a dynamic feedback model of this trade-off - where the individual weighs the subjective costs of accessing external information versus those of maintaining it in memory - using insights from existing cognitive control models based on economic principles (Kool & Botvinick, 2018). This trade-off is particularly interesting in children, as the optimal use of internal resources is even more crucial when limited. Our model makes some specific predictions for future research: 1) an individual child strikes a preferred balance between the effort to attend to goal-relevant information in the environment versus the effort to maintain it in working memory, 2) in order to maintain this balance as underlying memory and cognitive control mechanisms improve with age, the child will have to increasingly shift toward remembering, and 3) older children will show greater adaptability to changing task demands.

Children's emerging ability to balance internal and external cognitive resources

Australian children aged 6-9 years (N = 120, 71 females; data collected in 2021-2022) were tasked with remembering the locations of 1, 3, 5, and 7 targets hidden under 25 cups on different trials. In the critical test phase, children were provided with a limited number of tokens to allocate across trials, which they could use to mark target locations and assist future memory performance. Following the search period, children were invited to adjust their previous token allocation. Although 8- to 9-year-olds prospectively allocated proportionately more tokens to more difficult trials, 6- to 7-year-olds did so only in retrospect. During middle childhood, humans become increasingly adept at weighing up when to rely on their unaided capacities and when to offload cognitive demand.

Intention offloading: Domain-general versus task-specific confidence signals

Intention offloading refers to the use of external reminders to help remember delayed intentions (e.g., setting an alert to help you remember when you need to take your medication). Research has found that metacognitive processes influence offloading such that individual differences in confidence predict individual differences in offloading regardless of objective cognitive ability. The current study investigated the cross-domain organization of this relationship. Participants performed two perceptual discrimination tasks where objective accuracy was equalized using a staircase procedure. In a memory task, two measures of intention offloading were collected, (1) the overall likelihood of setting reminders, and (2) the bias in reminder-setting compared to the optimal strategy. It was found that perceptual confidence was associated with the first measure but not the second. It is shown that this is because individual differences in perceptual confidence capture meaningful differences in objective ability despite the staircase procedure. These findings indicate that intention offloading is influenced by both domain-general and task-specific metacognitive signals. They also show that even when task performance is equalized via staircasing, individual differences in confidence cannot be considered a pure measure of metacognitive bias.

Multifaceted consequences of visual distraction during natural behaviour

Visual distraction is a ubiquitous aspect of everyday life. Studying the consequences of distraction during temporally extended tasks, however, is not tractable with traditional methods. Here we developed a virtual reality approach that segments complex behaviour into cognitive subcomponents, including encoding, visual search, working memory usage, and decision-making. Participants copied a model display by selecting objects from a resource pool and placing them into a workspace. By manipulating the distractibility of objects in the resource pool, we discovered interfering effects of distraction across the different cognitive subcomponents. We successfully traced the consequences of distraction all the way from overall task performance to the decision-making processes that gate memory usage. Distraction slowed down behaviour and increased costly body movements. Critically, distraction increased encoding demands, slowed visual search, and decreased reliance on working memory. Our findings illustrate that the effects of visual distraction during natural behaviour can be rather focal but nevertheless have cascading consequences.

Left or right, that is the question: use of egocentric frame of reference and the right-eye advantage for understanding gestural signs in bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus)

How do bottlenose dolphins visually perceive the space around them? In particular, what cues do they use as a frame of reference for left-right perception? To address this question, we examined the dolphin's responses to various manipulations of the spatial relationship between the dolphin and the trainer by using gestural signs for actions given by the trainer, which have different meanings in the left and right hands. When the dolphins were tested with their backs to the trainer (Experiment 1) or in an inverted position underwater (Experiments 2 and 3), correct responses from the trainer's perspective were maintained for signs related to movement direction instructions. In contrast, reversed responses were frequently observed for signs that required different sounds for the left and right hands. When the movement direction instructions were presented with symmetrical graphic signs such as " × " and "●", accuracy decreased in the inverted posture (Experiment 3). Furthermore, when the signs for sounds were presented from either the left or right side of the dolphin's body, performance was better when the side of the sign movement coincided with the body side on which it was presented than when it was mismatched (Experiment 4). In the final experiment, when one eye was covered with an eyecup, the results showed that, as in the case of body-side presentation, performance was better when the open eye coincided with the side on which the sign movement was presented. These results indicate that dolphins used the egocentric frame for visuospatial cognition. In addition, they showed better performances when the gestural signs were presented to the right eye, suggesting the possibility of a left-hemispheric advantage in the dolphin's visuospatial cognition.

Outsourcing Memory to External Tools: A Review of 'Intention Offloading'

How do we remember delayed intentions? Three decades of research into prospective memory have provided insight into the cognitive and neural mechanisms involved in this form of memory. However, we depend on more than just our brains to remember intentions. We also use external props and tools such as calendars and diaries, strategically placed objects, and technologies such as smartphone alerts. This is known as 'intention offloading'. Despite the progress in our understanding of brain-based prospective memory, we know much less about the role of intention offloading in individuals' ability to fulfil delayed intentions. Here, we review recent research into intention offloading, with a particular focus on how individuals decide between storing intentions in internal memory versus external reminders. We also review studies investigating how intention offloading changes across the lifespan and how it relates to underlying brain mechanisms. We conclude that intention offloading is highly effective, experimentally tractable, and guided by metacognitive processes. Individuals have systematic biases in their offloading strategies that are stable over time. Evidence also suggests that individual differences and developmental changes in offloading strategies are driven at least in part by metacognitive processes. Therefore, metacognitive interventions could play an important role in promoting individuals' adaptive use of cognitive tools.

Partially Overlapping Neural Correlates of Metacognitive Monitoring and Metacognitive Control

Metacognition describes the process of monitoring one's own mental states, often for the purpose of cognitive control. Previous research has investigated how metacognitive signals are generated (metacognitive monitoring), for example, when people (both female/male) judge their confidence in their decisions and memories. Research has also investigated how metacognitive signals are used to influence behavior (metacognitive control), for example, setting a reminder (i.e., cognitive offloading) for something you are not confident you will remember. However, the mapping between metacognitive monitoring and metacognitive control needs further study on a neural level. We used fMRI to investigate a delayed-intentions task with a reminder element, allowing human participants to use their metacognitive insight to engage metacognitive control. Using multivariate pattern analysis, we found that we could separately decode both monitoring and control, and, to a lesser extent, cross-classify between them. Therefore, brain patterns associated with monitoring and control are partially, but not fully, overlapping.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Models of metacognition commonly distinguish between monitoring (how metacognition is formed) and control (how metacognition is used for behavioral regulation). Research into these facets of metacognition has often happened in isolation. Here, we provide a study which directly investigates the mapping between metacognitive monitoring and metacognitive control at a neural level. We applied multivariate pattern analysis to fMRI data from a novel task in which participants separately rated their confidence (metacognitive monitoring) and how much they would like to use a reminder (metacognitive control). We find support for the notion that the two aspects of metacognition overlap partially but not fully. We argue that future research should focus on how different metacognitive signals are selected for control.

Impact of Intrinsic Cognitive Skills and Metacognitive Beliefs on Tool Use Performance

Cognitive tools (e.g., calculators) provide all users with the same potential. Yet when people use such cognitive tools, interindividual variations are observed. Previous findings have indicated that 2 main factors could explain these variations: intrinsic cognitive skills (i.e., the “non–tool use” cognitive skills associated with the task targeted) and metacognitive beliefs about one's performance with tool use. In this study we sought to reproduce these findings and to investigate in more detail the nature of the relationships (i.e., linear vs. exponential) between tool use performance and intrinsic cognitive skills. In Experiment 1, 200 participants completed 2 cognitive tasks (calculation and geography) in 2 conditions (non–tool use vs. tool use). In Experiment 2, 70 participants performed a geography task in 2 conditions (non–tool use vs. tool use) and estimated their performance in each condition before completing the task. Results indicated that intrinsic cognitive skills and, to a lesser extent, metacognitive beliefs improved tool use performance: The higher the intrinsic cognitive skills and the higher participants estimated their tool use performance, the higher this tool use performance was. The nature of the relationship between tool use performance and intrinsic cognitive skills appeared to be linear rather than exponential. These findings extend previous research showing a strong impact of intrinsic cognitive skills on the performance associated with the use of cognitive tools or external aids.

Young children spontaneously devise an optimal external solution to a cognitive problem

Metacognition plays an essential role in adults' cognitive offloading decisions. Despite possessing basic metacognitive capacities, however, preschool-aged children often fail to offload effectively. Here, we introduced 3- to 5-year-olds to a novel search task in which they were unlikely to perform optimally across trials without setting external reminders about the location of a target. Children watched as an experimenter first hid a target in one of three identical opaque containers. The containers were then shuffled out of view before children had to guess where the target was hidden. In the test phase, children could perform perfectly by simply placing a marker in a transparent jar attached to the target container prior to shuffling, and then later selecting the marked container. Children of all ages used this external strategy above chance levels if they had seen it demonstrated to them, but only the 4- and 5-year-olds independently devised the strategy to improve their future performance. These results suggest that, when necessary for optimal performance, even 4- and 5-year-olds can use metacognitive knowledge about their own future uncertainty to deploy effective external solutions.

Individual differences in working memory capacity predict benefits to memory from intention offloading

Research suggests that individuals with lower working memory have difficulty remembering to fulfil delayed intentions. The current study examined whether the ability to offload intentions onto the environment mitigated these deficits. Participants (N = 268) completed three versions of a delayed intention task with and without the use of reminders, along with three measures of working memory capacity. Results showed that individuals with higher working memory fulfilled more intentions when having to rely on their own memory, but this difference was eliminated when offloading was permitted. Individuals with lower working memory chose to offload more often, suggesting that they were less willing to engage in effortful maintenance of internal representations when given the option. Working memory was not associated with metacognitive confidence or optimal offloading choices based on point value. These findings suggest offloading may help circumvent capacity limitations associated with maintaining and remembering delayed intentions.

Appealing to the cognitive miser: Using demand avoidance to modulate cognitive flexibility in cued and voluntary task switching

Current cognitive control accounts view goal-directed behavior as striking a balance between two antagonistic control demands: Stability, on the one hand, reflects a rigid, focused state of control and flexibility, while on the other, reflects a relaxed, distractible state, whereby goals can be rapidly updated to meet unexpected changes in demands. In the current study, we sought to test whether the avoidance of cognitive demand could motivate people to dynamically regulate control along the stability-flexibility continuum. In both cued (Experiment 1) and voluntary (Experiment 2) task-switching paradigms, we selectively associated either task-switches or task-repetitions with high cognitive demand (independent of task identity), and measured changes in performance in a following phase after the demand manipulation was removed. Contrasting performance with a control group, across both experiments, we found that selectively associating cognitive demand with task repetitions increased flexibility, but selectively associating cognitive demand with task switches failed to increase stability. The results of the current study provide novel evidence for avoidance-driven modulations of control regulation along the stability-flexibility continuum, while also highlighting some limitations in using task-switching paradigms to examine motivational influences on control adaptation. Data, analysis code, experiment code, and preprint available at osf.io/7rct9/. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Children boost their cognitive performance with a novel offloading technique

Ninety-seven children aged 4-11 (49 males, 48 females, mostly White) were given the opportunity to improve their problem-solving performance by devising and implementing a novel cognitive offloading strategy. Across two phases, they searched for hidden rewards using maps that were either aligned or misaligned with the search space. In the second phase, maps were presented on rotatable turntables, thus allowing children to manually align all maps and alleviate mental rotation demand. From age six onwards, children showed strong evidence of both mentally rotating misaligned maps in phase 1 and manually aligning them in phase 2. Older children used this form of cognitive offloading more frequently, which substantially improved performance and eliminated the individual differences observed in phase 1.

To organise or not to organise? Understanding search strategy preferences using Lego building blocks

Humans routinely organise or reconfigure the environment as part of their everyday activities, such as placing a set of keys in a designated location to reduce the need to remember its location. This type of spatial organisation is widely thought to reduce both the physical and cognitive demands of a task to allow individuals to perform tasks more easily. Although spatial organisation can be a useful strategy when searching for items in the environment, individuals do not always choose to utilise these organisational strategies when carrying out everyday tasks. Across three experiments, we examined individuals' preference for spatial organisation in the context of a real-world search task, and the degree to which individuals engaged in time- and effort-based cost-benefit analysis to inform whether to choose between an organisation-based or non-organisation-based search strategy. We found that individuals' strategy preferences could be explained by the perceived task time associated with each strategy, but not perceived task effort. However, even statistically controlling for relative perceived task time or reported effort, participants showed a strong systematic preference against organisation prior to engaging in the task, and, post-task, a strong preference towards organisation. Implications for understanding individuals' use of spatial organisation are discussed.

Saved information is remembered less well than deleted information, if the saving process is perceived as reliable

Prior research has shown that people are more likely to remember information that is deleted from a computer than information that is saved on a computer, presumably because saving serves as a form of cognitive offloading. Given recent concerns about the robustness and replicability of this "Google Effect," we conducted two experiments seeking to replicate and extend the phenomenon by identifying a potential boundary condition for when it is observed. In Experiment 1, we replicated the Google Effect, but only when participants experienced a practice phase demonstrating the reliability of the saving process. No evidence of a Google Effect was observed when participants experienced a practice phase demonstrating the saving process to be unreliable. In Experiment 2, we replicated the results of Experiment 1 in the reliable condition, while demonstrating the effect to be robust across 10 different topics of trivia statements. Taken together, these results suggest that the Google Effect is a replicable phenomenon, but that the perceived reliability of the saving process is critical for determining whether it is observed.

Harder Than You Think: How Outside Assistance Leads to Overconfidence

Cognitive ability consists not only of one's internal competence but also of the augmentation offered by the outside world. How much of our cognitive success is due to our own abilities, and how much is due to external support? Can we accurately draw that distinction? Here, we explored when and why people are unaware of their reliance on outside assistance. Across eight experiments (N = 2,440 participants recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk), people showed improved metacognitive calibration when assistance occurred after a delay or required active choice. Furthermore, these findings apply across a wide range of cognitive tasks, including semantic memory (Experiments 1a and 1b), episodic memory (Experiments 2a and 2b), and problem solving (Experiments 3a-3d). These experiments offer important insights into how we understand our own abilities when we rely on outside help.

Judgements of effort as a function of post-trial versus post-task elicitation

Cognitive effort is a central construct in our lives, yet our understanding of the processes underlying our perception of effort is limited. Performance is typically used as one way to assess effort in cognitive tasks (e.g., tasks that take longer are generally thought to be more effortful); however, Dunn and Risko reported a recent case where such “objective” measures of effort were dissociated from judgements of effort (i.e., subjective effort). This dissociation occurred when participants either made their judgements of effort after the task (i.e., reading stimuli composed of rotated words) or without ever performing the task. This leaves open the possibility that if participants made their judgements of effort more proximal to the actual experience of performing the task (e.g., right after a given trial) that these judgements might better correspond to putatively “objective” measures of effort. To address this question, we conducted two experiments replicating Dunn and Risko with additional probes for post-trial judgements of effort (i.e., a judgement of effort made right after each trial). Results provided some support for the notion that judgements of effort more closely follow reading times when made post-trial as opposed to post-task. Implications of the present work for our understanding of judgements of effort are discussed.

From metacognitive beliefs to strategy selection: does fake performance feedback influence cognitive offloading?

The ubiquitous availability of technological aids requires individuals to constantly decide between either externalizing cognitive processes into these aids (i.e. cognitive offloading) or relying on their own internal cognitive resources. With the present research, we investigated the influence of metacognitive beliefs on individuals’ offloading behavior in an experimental setup (N = 159). We manipulated participants’ metacognitive beliefs about their memory abilities by providing fake performance feedback: below-average feedback, above-average feedback, or no feedback (control-group). We then measured offloading behavior, using a pattern copying task in which participants copied a color pattern from a model window into a workspace window. While solving this task, participants could rely either more on an internal memory strategy or more on an offloading strategy. Fake performance feedback affected the participants’ metacognitive evaluations about their memory abilities (below-group < control-group < above-group). Although fake performance feedback did not affect actual offloading behavior, the participants receiving below-average performance feedback reported that they had relied more on an offloading strategy than those participants receiving above-average performance feedback. Furthermore, the participants in the below-group reported lower general memory abilities than the other groups at the end of the experiment. We conclude that while fake performance feedback strongly influenced metacognitive beliefs, this did not transfer into a change of strategy selection, thus not influencing offloading behavior. We propose to consider not only metacognitive beliefs but also metacognitive experiences as potential determinants of cognitive offloading.

The effect of metacognitive training on confidence and strategic reminder setting

Individuals often choose between remembering information using their own memory ability versus using external resources to reduce cognitive demand (i.e. ‘cognitive offloading’). For example, to remember a future appointment an individual could choose to set a smartphone reminder or depend on their unaided memory ability. Previous studies investigating strategic reminder setting found that participants set more reminders than would be optimal, and this bias towards reminder-setting was predicted by metacognitive underconfidence in unaided memory ability. Due to the link between underconfidence in memory ability and excessive reminder setting, the aim of the current study was to investigate whether metacognitive training is an effective intervention to a) improve metacognitive judgment accuracy, and b) reduce bias in strategic offloading behaviour. Participants either received metacognitive training which involved making performance predictions and receiving feedback on judgment accuracy, or were part of a control group. As predicted, metacognitive training increased judgment accuracy: participants in the control group were significantly underconfident in their memory ability, whereas the experimental group showed no significant metacognitive bias. However, contrary to predictions, both experimental and control groups were significantly biased toward reminder-setting, and did not differ significantly. Therefore, reducing metacognitive bias was not sufficient to eliminate the bias towards reminders. We suggest that the reminder bias likely results in part from erroneous metacognitive evaluations, but that other factors such as a preference to avoid cognitive effort may also be relevant. Finding interventions to mitigate these factors could improve the adaptive use of external resources.

Excessive use of reminders: Metacognition and effort-minimisation in cognitive offloading

People often use external reminders to help remember delayed intentions. This is a form of "cognitive offloading". Individuals sometimes offload more often than would be optimal (Gilbert et al., 2020). This bias has been linked to participants' erroneous metacognitive underconfidence in their memory abilities. However, underconfidence is unlikely to fully explain the bias. An additional, previously-untested factor that may contribute to the offloading bias is a preference to avoid cognitive effort associated with remembering internally. The present Registered Report examined evidence for this hypothesis. One group of participants received payment contingent on their performance of the task (hypothesised to increase cognitive effort, and therefore reduce the bias towards offloading); another group received a flat payment for taking part, as in the earlier experiment. The offloading bias was significantly reduced (but not eliminated) in the rewarded group, suggesting that a preference to avoid cognitive effort influences cognitive offloading.

Problem Solvers Adjust Cognitive Offloading Based on Performance Goals

When incorporating the environment into mental processing (cf., cognitive offloading), one creates novel cognitive strategies that have the potential to improve task performance. Improved performance can, for example, mean faster problem solving, more accurate solutions, or even higher grades at university.¹ Although cognitive offloading has frequently been associated with improved performance, it is yet unclear how flexible problem solvers are at matching their offloading habits with their current performance goals (can people improve goal-related instead of generic performance, e.g., when being in a hurry and aiming for a "quick and dirty" solution?). Here, we asked participants to solve a cognitive task, provided them with different goals-maximizing speed (SPD) or accuracy (ACC), respectively-and measured how frequently (Experiment 1) and how proficiently (Experiment 2) they made use of a novel external resource to support their cognitive processing. Experiment 1 showed that offloading behavior varied with goals: Participants offloaded less in the SPD than in the ACC condition. Experiment 2 showed that this differential offloading behavior was associated with high goal-related performance: fast answers in the SPD, accurate answers in the ACC condition. Simultaneously, goal-unrelated performance was sacrificed: inaccurate answers in the SPD, slow answers in the ACC condition. The findings support the notion of humans as canny offloaders who are able to successfully incorporate their environment in pursuit of their current cognitive goals. Future efforts should be focused on the finding's generalizability, for example, to settings without feedback or with high mental workload.

Children Devise and Selectively Use Tools to Offload Cognition

From maps sketched in sand to supercomputing software, humans ubiquitously enhance cognitive performance by creating and using artifacts that bear mental load [1-5]. This extension of information processing into the environment has taken center stage in debates about the nature of cognition in humans and other animals [6-9]. How does the human mind acquire such strategies? In two experiments, we investigated the developmental origins of cognitive offloading in 150 children aged between 4 and 11 years. We created a memory task in which children were required to recall the location of hidden targets. In one experiment, participants were provided with a pre-specified cognitive offloading opportunity: an option to mark the target locations with tokens during the hiding period. Even 4-year-old children quickly adopted this external strategy and, in line with a metacognitive account, children across ages offloaded more often when the task was more difficult. In a second experiment, we provided children with the means to devise their own cognitive offloading strategy. Very few younger children spontaneously devised a solution, but by ages 10 and 11, nearly all did so. In a follow-up test phase, a simple prompt greatly increased the rate at which the younger children devised an offloading strategy. These findings suggest that sensitivity to the difficulties of thinking arises early in development and improves throughout the early school years, with children learning to modify the world around them to compensate for their cognitive limits.

The psychology of task management: The smaller tasks trap

When people are confronted with multiple tasks, how do they decide which task to do first? Normatively, priority should be given to the most efficient task (i.e., the task with the best cost/benefit ratio). However, we hypothesize that people consistently choose to address smaller (involving less work) tasks first, and continue to focus on smaller tasks, even when this strategy emerges as less efficient, a phenomenon we term the “smaller tasks trap”. We also hypothesize that the preference for the smaller tasks is negatively related to individual differences in the tendency for rational thinking. To test these hypotheses, we developed a novel paradigm consisting of an incentive-compatible task management game, in which participants are saddled with multiple tasks and have to decide how to handle them. The results lend weight to the smaller tasks trap and indicate that individual differences in rational thinking predict susceptibility to this trap. That is, participants low in rational thinking preferred to start with a smaller (vs. larger) task and focused more on the smaller tasks regardless of their efficiency. Consequently, their overall performance in the task management game was significantly lower. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings and suggest possible interventions that may help people improve their task management.

Developmental origins of cognitive offloading

Many animals manipulate their environments in ways that appear to augment cognitive processing. Adult humans show remarkable flexibility in this domain, typically relying on internal cognitive processing when adequate but turning to external support in situations of high internal demand. We use calendars, calculators, navigational aids and other external means to compensate for our natural cognitive shortcomings and achieve otherwise unattainable feats of intelligence. As yet, however, the developmental origins of this fundamental capacity for cognitive offloading remain largely unknown. In two studies, children aged 4-11 years (n = 258) were given an opportunity to manually rotate a turntable to eliminate the internal demands of mental rotation--to solve the problem in the world rather than in their heads. In study 1, even the youngest children showed a linear relationship between mental rotation demand and likelihood of using the external strategy, paralleling the classic relationship between angle of mental rotation and reaction time. In study 2, children were introduced to a version of the task where manually rotating inverted stimuli was sometimes beneficial to performance and other times redundant. With increasing age, children were significantly more likely to manually rotate the turntable only when it would benefit them. These results show how humans gradually calibrate their cognitive offloading strategies throughout childhood and thereby uncover the developmental origins of this central facet of intelligence.

Offloading items from memory: individual differences in cognitive offloading in a short-term memory task

Cognitive offloading refers to the act of reducing the mental processing requirements of a task through physical actions like writing down information or storing information on a cell phone or computer. Offloading can lead to improved performance on ongoing tasks with high cognitive demand, such as tasks where multiple pieces of information must be simultaneously maintained. However, less is known about why some individuals choose to engage in offloading and under what conditions they might choose to do so. In the present study, offloading behavior is investigated in a short-term memory task requiring memory for letters. The present study is a replication and extension of a previous study conducted by Risko and Dunn, and tests the new prediction that individuals with lower working memory capacity will be more likely to offload. Here, we find that offloading information confers a performance advantage over relying on internal memory stores, particularly at higher memory loads. However, we fail to observe that those with poorer memory abilities have a greater propensity for offloading or benefit more from it. Instead, our findings suggest that cognitive offloading may be a valid compensatory strategy to improve performance of memory-based tasks for individuals with a wide range of memory ability.

Confidence guides spontaneous cognitive offloading

BACKGROUND

Cognitive offloading is the use of physical action to reduce the cognitive demands of a task. Everyday memory relies heavily on this practice; for example, when we write down to-be-remembered information or use diaries, alerts, and reminders to trigger delayed intentions. A key goal of recent research has been to investigate the processes that trigger cognitive offloading. This research has demonstrated that individuals decide whether or not to offload based on a potentially erroneous metacognitive evaluation of their mental abilities. Therefore, improving the accuracy of metacognitive evaluations may help to optimise offloading behaviour. However, previous studies typically measure participants' use of an explicitly instructed offloading strategy, in contrast to everyday life where offloading strategies must often be generated spontaneously.

RESULTS

We administered a computer-based task requiring participants to remember delayed intentions. One group of participants was explicitly instructed on a method for setting external reminders; another was not. The latter group spontaneously set reminders but did so less often than the instructed group. Offloading improved performance in both groups. Crucially, metacognition (confidence in unaided memory ability) guided both instructed and spontaneous offloading: Participants in both groups set more reminders when they were less confident (regardless of actual memory ability).

CONCLUSIONS

These results show that the link between metacognition and cognitive offloading holds even when offloading strategies need to be spontaneously generated. Thus, metacognitive interventions are potentially able to alter offloading behaviour, without requiring offloading strategies to be explicitly instructed.

Cognitive Offloading: Structuring the Environment to Improve Children's Working Memory Task Performance

Research has shown that adults can engage in cognitive offloading, whereby internal processes are offloaded onto the environment to help task performance. Here, we investigate an application of this approach with children, in particular children with poor working memory. Participants were required to remember and recall sequences of colors by placing colored blocks in the correct serial order. In one condition the blocks were arranged to facilitate cognitive offloading (i.e., grouped by color), whereas in the other condition they were arranged randomly. Across two experiments (total N = 166) the ordered condition improved task performance for children with low working memory ability. In addition, participants in Experiment 2 rated the difficulty of the two arrangements and performed a further condition in which they were given an opportunity to freely arrange the blocks before completing the task. Despite performing better in the ordered condition, children with low working memory ability did not rate the ordered arrangement as easier, nor did they choose an ordered arrangement when given the opportunity to do so. This research shows that cognitive offloading can also be a useful process in populations other than typical adults, and the implications of this work for supporting children with poor working memory are discussed.

A role for metamemory in cognitive offloading

Cognitive offloading refers to our reliance on the external environment in order to reduce cognitive demand. For instance, people write notes on paper or smartphones in order not to forget shopping lists or upcoming appointments. A plausible hypothesis is that such offloading relies on metamemory – our confidence in our future memory performance. However, this hypothesis has not been directly tested, and it remains unclear when and how people use external sources to aid their encoding and retrieval of information. In four experiments, here we asked participants to learn word pairs and decide whether to offload some of the pairs by “saving” them on a computer. In the memory test, they had the opportunity to use this saved information on half of trials. Participants adaptively saved the most difficult items and used this offloaded information to boost their memory performance. Crucially, participants' confidence judgments about their memory predicted their decisions to use the saved information, indicating that cognitive offloading is associated with metacognitive evaluation about memory performance. These findings were accommodated by a Bayesian computational model in which beliefs about the performance boost gained from using offloaded information are negatively coupled to an evaluation of memory ability. Together our findings highlight a close link between metamemory and cognitive offloading.

Understanding the cognitive miser: Cue-utilization in effort-based decision making

The notion that individuals adapt their behaviors in ways that are sensitive to the effortfulness of cognitive processing is pervasive in psychology. In the current set of experiments, we provide a test of a cue-utilization account of how individuals decide which course of action is more or less effortful. In particular, we contrast the influences of time costs and demands on executive control with the influence of an available effort cue. Using a variant of the demand selection task (DST) that specifically focused on making effort-based decisions, we provide evidence that effort-based decisions can be dissociated from both time costs and demands on executive control in a manner predicted by a cue-utilization account.

Which cognitive tools do we prefer to use, and is that preference rational?

This work aims to address the issue of which kind of cognitive tools we prefer, and whether this preference is rational. To do so, we proposed three experiments in which participants had to play the game Guess Who? by choosing between three tools that assisted them in three distinct cognitive functions (Working memory vs. Selective visual attention vs. Decision-making). In Experiment 3, additional tasks were proposed to assess participants' performance and meta-representations in working memory, selective visual attention and decision-making. Our findings indicate that participants preferred to use a cognitive tool assisting working memory over selective visual attention and decision-making. The meta-representation of participants' performance influenced the decision to use one cognitive tool over the others much more than individual performance itself. These results suggest that a search for effectiveness rather than efficiency, as well as the meta-representations of cognitive performance might be two key predictors of people's preference toward a cognitive tool.

Cue awareness in avoiding effortful control

Based on a recent metacognitive account, cognitive effort is the result of an inferential evaluation made over explicitly available cues. Following from this account, we present here a pre-registered experiment that tested the specific hypothesis that explicit awareness of cues that are aligned with cognitive demand is a prerequisite in avoiding effortful lines of action. We attempted to modulate levels of effort avoidance behavior by introducing an incentive (between-subjects) to monitor two lines of action that, unbeknownst to individuals, varied in the probability of a task switch. Importantly, previous research has demonstrated that the difference in these probabilities is relatively opaque to individuals. We did not find strong evidence for our incentive manipulation having an effect on demand avoidance as indexed by individuals' choices in a block of the task where avoiding effort was instructed. However, we do find that being aware of the task-switching cue appears to increase the likelihood of demand avoidance. We consider these results within the context of the metacognition of cognitive effort.

Representation control increases task efficiency in complex graphical representations

In complex graphical representations, the relevant information for a specific task is often distributed across multiple spatial locations. In such situations, understanding the representation requires internal transformation processes in order to extract the relevant information. However, digital technology enables observers to alter the spatial arrangement of depicted information and therefore to offload the transformation processes. The objective of this study was to investigate the use of such a representation control (i.e. the users' option to decide how information should be displayed) in order to accomplish an information extraction task in terms of solution time and accuracy. In the representation control condition, the participants were allowed to reorganize the graphical representation and reduce information density. In the control condition, no interactive features were offered. We observed that participants in the representation control condition solved tasks that required reorganization of the maps faster and more accurate than participants without representation control. The present findings demonstrate how processes of cognitive offloading, spatial contiguity, and information coherence interact in knowledge media intended for broad and diverse groups of recipients.

Anticipating cognitive effort: roles of perceived error-likelihood and time demands

Why are some actions evaluated as effortful? In the present set of experiments we address this question by examining individuals' perception of effort when faced with a trade-off between two putative cognitive costs: how much time a task takes vs. how error-prone it is. Specifically, we were interested in whether individuals anticipate engaging in a small amount of hard work (i.e., low time requirement, but high error-likelihood) vs. a large amount of easy work (i.e., high time requirement, but low error-likelihood) as being more effortful. In between-subject designs, Experiments 1 through 3 demonstrated that individuals anticipate options that are high in perceived error-likelihood (yet less time consuming) as more effortful than options that are perceived to be more time consuming (yet low in error-likelihood). Further, when asked to evaluate which of the two tasks was (a) more effortful, (b) more error-prone, and (c) more time consuming, effort-based and error-based choices closely tracked one another, but this was not the case for time-based choices. Utilizing a within-subject design, Experiment 4 demonstrated overall similar pattern of judgments as Experiments 1 through 3. However, both judgments of error-likelihood and time demand similarly predicted effort judgments. Results are discussed within the context of extant accounts of cognitive control, with considerations of how error-likelihood and time demands may independently and conjunctively factor into judgments of cognitive effort.

Storing information in-the-world: Metacognition and cognitive offloading in a short-term memory task

We often store to-be-remembered information externally (e.g., written down on a piece of paper) rather than internally. In the present investigation, we examine factors that influence the decision to store information in-the-world versus in-the-head using a variant of a traditional short term memory task. In Experiments 1a and 1b participants were presented with to-be-remembered items and either had to rely solely on internal memory or had the option to write down the presented information. In Experiments 2a and 2b participants were presented with the same stimuli but made metacognitive judgments about their predicted performance and effort expenditure. The spontaneous use of external storage was related both to the number of items to be remembered and an individual's actual and perceived short-term-memory capacity. Interestingly, individuals often used external storage despite its use affording no observable benefit. Implications for understanding how individuals integrate external resources in pursuing cognitive goals are discussed.