Background

We use various kinds of technology everyday in our lives. Often we use technology to augment our memories. This is sometimes called prosthetic memory, or external memory. It can be in the form of another person, or saved as data on computers for later consumption. Sparrow, Liu, and Wegner (2011) conducted a study to see what happens to our own memory when we offload(save) it. They found that our memory for offloaded items goes down. The problem is this result has been inconsistent in its replicability. Furthermore we don’t know much about why we make the decisions to offload.

What we do know is that people will only offload onto other people if they believe that person to be reliable and trustworthy. Furthermore, we know that people will only offload if they believe they will have access to the offloaded information. What is unclear is how sensitive trust in a computer is. I devised an experiment to manipulate trust in the storage device to see if people would still offload. My results showed that having the computer fail to save information would make people lose trust in the computer and thus not offload when asked to use the same computer again. Furthermore, during their practice using the computer , people did not experience the offloading effect. This is likely because they default to not trusting that they would have future access until it was proven that they would.

Design Implications

When we are designing file saving systems, we need to account for trust in these systems. By making it obvious that an item was saved will lead to better retrievability of both an offloaded item, and items that were not offloaded. An example of this would be a quick link that appears on the screen showing them that a file was indeed saved.