Information without knowledge: the effects of Internet search on learning

Abstract

The Internet has radically shifted how people access information. Instead of storing information internally, increasingly, people outsource to the Internet and retrieve it when needed. While this is an efficient strategy in many ways, its downstream consequences remain largely unexplored. This research examines how accessing online information impacts how people remember information in a learning context. Across five experiments, participants studied for a quiz either by searching online to access relevant information or by directly receiving that same information without online search. Those who searched the Internet performed worse in the learning assessment, indicating that they stored less new knowledge in internal memory. However, participants who searched the Internet were as confident, or even more confident, that they had mastered the study material compared to those who did not search online. We argue that, by making information retrievability salient, Internet search reduces the likelihood of information being stored in memory. Further, these results suggest that searching online leads to the misattribution of online information to internal memory, thus masking the Internet-induced learning deficits.