In the third test, 28 Columbia students were asked a series of trivia questions and allowed to take notes. The students who were told the information would be saved in one of six computer folders had a harder time remembering the information than those who were told it would be erased. In the last experiment, 34 Columbia undergrads were told the information would be saved in various files with names like “Facts,” “Data” and “Names.” The students remembered the file names better than the information itself, the researchers found.

The findings show “there is no doubt that our strategies are shifting in learning,” Roddy Roediger, a psychologist at Washington University, told Science in an accompanying article. “Why remember something if I know I can look it up again? In some sense, with Google and other search engines, we can offload some of our memory demands onto machines.”