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  3. The Internet may be changing merely what we remember, not our capacity to do so, suggests Columbia University psychology profess

The Internet may be changing merely what we remember, not our capacity to do so, suggests Columbia University psychology profess

admin2023-03-23  30
问题     The Internet may be changing merely what we remember, not our capacity to do so, suggests Columbia University psychology professor Betsy Sparrow. In 2011, Sparrow led a study in which participants were asked to record 40 factoids in a computer ( "an ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain," for example). Half of the participants were told the information would be erased, while the other half were told it would be saved. Guess what? The latter group made no effort to recall the information when quizzed on it later, because they knew they could find it on their computers. In the same study, a group was asked to remember both the information and the folders it was stored in. They didn’t remember the information, but they remembered how to find the folders. In other words, human memory is not deteriorating but "adapting to new communications technology," Sparrow says.
    In a very practical way, the Internet is becoming an external hard drive for our memories, a process known as "cognitive offloading. " Traditionally, this role was fulfilled by data banks, libraries, and other humans. Your father may never remember birthdays because your mother does, for instance. Some worry that this is having a destructive effect on society, but Sparrow sees an upside. Perhaps, she suggests, the trend will change our approach to learning from a focus on individual facts and memorization to an emphasis on more conceptual thinking—something that is not available on the Internet. " I personally have never seen all that much intellectual value in memorizing things," Sparrow says, adding that we haven’t lost our ability to do it.
    Still other experts say it’s too soon to understand how the Internet affects our brains. There is no experimental evidence showing that it interferes with our ability to focus, for instance, wrote psychologists Christopher Chabris and Daniel J. Simons. And surfing the web exercised the brain more than reading did among computer-savvy older adults in a 2008 study involving 24 participants at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at the University of California, Los Angeles.
    "There may be costs associated with our increased reliance on the Internet, but I’d have to imagine that overall the benefits are going to outweigh those costs," observes psychology professor Benjamin Storm. "It seems pretty clear that memory is changing, but is it changing for the better? At this point, we don’t know. "
The process of "cognitive offloading" ________.
选项 A、helps us identify false information
B、keeps our memory from failing
C、enables us to classify trivial facts
D、lessens our memory burdens
答案D
解析 推断题。根据题干中的cognitive offloading定位到第二段。其中提到互联网正在成为我们记忆的外部硬盘，这一过程被称为“认知卸载”，而且文中还提到这一角色是由数据库、图书馆和其他人完成的，还举了个例子，即“你的父亲可能永远不会记得生日，因为你的母亲会记得”。我们的记忆有了别的承载体，这个“认知卸载”的过程也就是给记忆减压，选项D符合文义。选项A、B以及C均不能覆盖文中提到的“外部硬盘”以及“数据库”和“图书馆”这些功能，也不能解释文中提到的例子，故不符合文义，均排除。
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