No conclusive evidence that difficult general knowledge questions cause a “Google Stroop effect”. A replication study
Access to the digital “all-knowing cloud” has become an integral part of our daily lives. It has been suggested that the increasing offloading of information and information processing services to the cloud will alter human cognition and metacognition in the short and long term. A much-cited study p...
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doaj-bc2f1effaa684b0f855ee82c6a11e9e82020-11-25T04:05:27ZengPeerJ Inc.PeerJ2167-83592020-11-018e1032510.7717/peerj.10325No conclusive evidence that difficult general knowledge questions cause a “Google Stroop effect”. A replication studyGuido Hesselmann0Department of General and Biological Psychology, Psychologische Hochschule Berlin (PHB), Berlin, GermanyAccess to the digital “all-knowing cloud” has become an integral part of our daily lives. It has been suggested that the increasing offloading of information and information processing services to the cloud will alter human cognition and metacognition in the short and long term. A much-cited study published in Science in 2011 provided first behavioral evidence for such changes in human cognition. Participants had to answer difficult trivia questions, and subsequently showed longer response times in a variant of the Stroop task with internet-related words (“Google Stroop effect”). The authors of this study concluded that the concept of the Internet is automatically activated in situations where information is missing (e.g., because we might feel the urge to “google” the information). However, the “Google Stroop effect” could not be replicated in two recent replication attempts as part of a large replicability project. After the failed replication was published in 2018, the first author of the original study pointed out some problems with the design of the failed replication. In our study, we therefore aimed to replicate the “Google Stroop effect” with a research design closer to the original experiment. Our results revealed no conclusive evidence in favor of the notion that the concept of the Internet or internet access (via computers or smartphones) is automatically activated when participants are faced with hard trivia questions. We provide recommendations for follow-up research.https://peerj.com/articles/10325.pdfCognitive offloadingMemoryCognitionPriming |
collection |
DOAJ |
language |
English |
format |
Article |
sources |
DOAJ |
author |
Guido Hesselmann |
spellingShingle |
Guido Hesselmann No conclusive evidence that difficult general knowledge questions cause a “Google Stroop effect”. A replication study PeerJ Cognitive offloading Memory Cognition Priming |
author_facet |
Guido Hesselmann |
author_sort |
Guido Hesselmann |
title |
No conclusive evidence that difficult general knowledge questions cause a “Google Stroop effect”. A replication study |
title_short |
No conclusive evidence that difficult general knowledge questions cause a “Google Stroop effect”. A replication study |
title_full |
No conclusive evidence that difficult general knowledge questions cause a “Google Stroop effect”. A replication study |
title_fullStr |
No conclusive evidence that difficult general knowledge questions cause a “Google Stroop effect”. A replication study |
title_full_unstemmed |
No conclusive evidence that difficult general knowledge questions cause a “Google Stroop effect”. A replication study |
title_sort |
no conclusive evidence that difficult general knowledge questions cause a “google stroop effect”. a replication study |
publisher |
PeerJ Inc. |
series |
PeerJ |
issn |
2167-8359 |
publishDate |
2020-11-01 |
description |
Access to the digital “all-knowing cloud” has become an integral part of our daily lives. It has been suggested that the increasing offloading of information and information processing services to the cloud will alter human cognition and metacognition in the short and long term. A much-cited study published in Science in 2011 provided first behavioral evidence for such changes in human cognition. Participants had to answer difficult trivia questions, and subsequently showed longer response times in a variant of the Stroop task with internet-related words (“Google Stroop effect”). The authors of this study concluded that the concept of the Internet is automatically activated in situations where information is missing (e.g., because we might feel the urge to “google” the information). However, the “Google Stroop effect” could not be replicated in two recent replication attempts as part of a large replicability project. After the failed replication was published in 2018, the first author of the original study pointed out some problems with the design of the failed replication. In our study, we therefore aimed to replicate the “Google Stroop effect” with a research design closer to the original experiment. Our results revealed no conclusive evidence in favor of the notion that the concept of the Internet or internet access (via computers or smartphones) is automatically activated when participants are faced with hard trivia questions. We provide recommendations for follow-up research. |
topic |
Cognitive offloading Memory Cognition Priming |
url |
https://peerj.com/articles/10325.pdf |
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