The Google effect, also known as digital amnesia, is the propensity to forget the knowledge that is easily accessible online via search engines.
The first study was conducted by Daniel L. Schacter and Molly E. Crockett in 2001. In this study, they asked participants to use the Internet to find a series of information on a famous person. Some of the information could be found using a search engine such as Google or Yahoo!, while other information such as a photograph and a biography was only available by using the library databases. After the search was completed, the participants were given a list of ten facts that they had found during the search. They also had to answer questions about some of the facts that they knew the answers to as well as answer some questions about facts that they did not know the answer to. The participants were also given different amounts of money for each fact they remembered correctly and had to be paid again if they had to recollect the same fact that they had forgotten previously. The results of this experiment showed that participants who had access to the additional information in the libraries and used the library databases to perform their searches were able to remember more facts about the person than those who searched using only the Internet search engines. This shows that the additional information that was found in the libraries provided a higher-quality source of knowledge for the participants.
Another study conducted by Schacter and Crockett found that people who had access to multiple sources of information were less likely to forget the information they sought than people who only had access to information from a single source. They also found that people who had access to information from multiple sources could learn more information because they had a greater opportunity to compare and analyze the sources of that information. A third study done by the authors of this study also showed that those who had the opportunity to search for information in more than one way were more likely to remember it because they used a number of different strategies to help them store the information in their brains. These results show how access to a wide variety of information sources makes it possible for people to learn and remember more information about a subject than they would if they were only exposed to information from a single source. However, further research on this topic is needed to determine the exact relationship between access to multiple sources of information and the ability to remember information.
