Remembering and Forgetting in the Digital Age

New technologies have the potential to greatly enhance and expand the functioning of human memory, but they can also come with unintended consequences. Having access to smartphones and the Internet, for example, has changed how people remember (and often what they forget). In this talk, I will provide an overview of research from my lab investigating the impact of technology on memory and cognition, focusing in particular on topics such as cognitive offloading, the mnemonic consequences of photo-taking, and how our digital interactions may be reshaping how we think and remember. 

My research focuses broadly on human memory with a special focus on the causes and consequences of forgetting.  I am particularly interested in the role of forgetting in resolving competition during retrieval, overcoming fixation while thinking and solving problems, updating autobiographical memory, and facilitating new learning.  I am also interested in how people use smartphones, the Internet, and other technologies and the effects of such use on the everyday functioning of memory.

Speaker: Ben Storm, UC Santa Cruz