Speed Considerations Can Be of Little Concern When Outsourcing Thought to External Devices

Abstract

Most research on human cognition has focused on processes “inside the box”. Recently, researchers questioned this monopoly, promoting the relevance of cognitive processing “outside the box”, for instance, when using a GPS to navigate. For processing that is distributed between internal and external resources to work efficiently, humans need good heuristics that help them decide when to use which resource. A novel human-computer-interaction paradigm was employed to explore whether people follow the “minimal memory” heuristic and offload cognitive processing onto external resources whenever possible or the “soft constraint” heuristic and offload cognitive processing only if it is associated with an overall higher speed than internal processing. Participants, despite lower speed, nearly exclusively cognized outside the box, which contradicts the soft constraint heuristic and mostly supports the minimal memory heuristic. Implications for human-technology interaction as well as alternative heuristics relevant for cognitive offloading are discussed.