Thinking about my amazing (photos of) vacation: On the relationship between cognition and technology

With its enormous store of information and ubiquitous use, the Internet and its users have potential to enter an intellectual partnership that influences how people process information. One possible manifestation of this intellectual partnership is a shift from reliance on one’s own memory to the Internet for information storage. Previous research finds that people “outsource” declarative memories to web-based search engines like Google (Sparrow et al., 2011). In a similar way, might people outsource affective memories to social networking sites, in which people typically post and discuss photos of happy personal events? To test this possibility, I observed whether priming participants with thoughts of vacation (an affective memory that is likely to be stored online in the form of shared photos) or an academic experience (control) influenced their response times to words in a Stroop task (vacation words, social media words, or neutral words). I found that participants in the vacation-priming condition responded most quickly to vacation words and to social media words, although the differences did not reach full significance below the p = . 05 threshold. Nonetheless, these findings may provide initial evidence that thinking about a positive event might not only make content-related thoughts more accessible, but also thoughts related to “where” memories of that event are “stored” (i.e., in online social media). Future research might fruitfully explore this possibility in greater detail. KEYWORDS: Photosharing; social media; memory; technology; cognition COGNITION AND TECHNOLOGY 3 Thinking about my amazing (photos of) vacation: On the relationship between cognition and technology Much of what we know about basic cognitive processes such as attention and memory stems from classic psychological experiments of the mid-to-late 20 century. For example, Tolman’s (1948) groundbreaking work on cognitive maps first described our ability to rapidly and effortlessly comprehend the spatial organization of nearby objects; Loftus’s (1975) early findings challenged the notion that autobiographical experiences are objectively stored in memory; and Kahneman and colleagues (1993) revealed systematic biases in how we overvalue only a few aspects of personal events while neglecting many others. Although this influential research has helped lay the foundation for a basic scientific understanding of how the human mind works, times have changed. The worlds in which those seminal participants lived are much different than of their contemporaries. Perhaps most notably, people today live in an era of unique, personalized, and pervasive technology. Phones that fit in pockets can take high-definition photos and videos, which can be posted to online social profiles, which can be viewed by hundreds of friends and millions in the public domain – all for free, with little effort, and in a matter of seconds. Everyday experience is now digitalized and documented. Thus, in my thesis project I sought to answer the following question: How might our basic cognitive processes be affected by such unprecedented technology? I focused on one specific cognitive process (i.e., thought accessibility) and one specific form of technology (i.e., photo-sharing). Given today’s high degree of digitalization and documentation, I predicted that when people are asked to think about a happy past experience, not only are concepts of that experience activated but also concepts of photographs of that experience. In other words, when COGNITION AND TECHNOLOGY 4 people think back to a recent vacation, they might not only think about the actual trip (e.g., “that amazing view”) but also where that experience is now “stored” (e.g., “that photo of the amazing view”). By examining this relationship between cognition and technology, I hope to expand previous research by highlighting ways by which basic mental processes may be changing and updating to fit modern life. In the first section of this paper, I will discuss the explosion of personalized technology in recent years, with a focus on social media and photo-sharing. Next, I will summarize recent research that examines various effects of this technology on psychology, with a focus on cognitive processes. Then, I will outline my specific hypothesis that relates thought accessibility to online photo-sharing, and present the results of a laboratory study that tested my predictions. Finally, I will discuss my findings and relate them back to older models of basic cognitive processing, emphasizing possible future implications as personalized and digitized technology continues to develop and pervade everyday life. Explosion of personalized technology The advent of the personal computer is generally attributed to Apple’s original preassembled, mass-produced computer that made its debut in 1977. Since then, the personal computer industry has grown dramatically. By 2000, over 50% of United States households contained a personal computer, and this number rose significantly when the Internet became widespread (“Personal Computer,” 2012). Today, it is estimated that there are over one billion personal computers in use among people worldwide (Pettey, 2008). More recently, smartphones and tablets that further enable Internet use have also been increasing in popularity (“Personal Computer,” 2012). COGNITION AND TECHNOLOGY 5 Indeed, the Internet was an especially monumental step in the development of personalized technology. Originally used for governmental networking, the Internet experienced growth along with the development of the personal computer. Starting in 1993, the Internet became available for commercial use and experienced accelerating growth since. By 2005, 68% of adults and 90% of teenagers in the United States had used the Internet and regularly communicated among “online” portals and networks (“Internet,” 2012). As of March 31, 2011, there were an estimated 2.095 billion Internet users worldwide (“Internet Usage,” 2012). In recent years, social networking sites – websites characterized by user-generated content that allow users to connect and interact with each other (Lee & Ma, 2012) – have especially exploded in popularity among Internet users. Facebook, one of today’s leading social networking sites, has almost ubiquitous use on college campuses (Lampe et al., 2008). Created in 2004, Facebook had over 845 million users worldwide as of December 31, 2011 (Ellison et al., 2007; Protalinski, 2012). What do people tend to do on Facebook? First and most generally, Facebook is primarily used to maintain friendships, and most users cite school friends as their primary audience (Ellison et al., 2007). However, Lee and Ma (2012) also identified four specific major motivations for using Facebook: information seeking, socializing, status seeking, and entertainment. Across all of these categories, one of the most widely cited reasons for using Facebook is to upload personal photos (Lampe et al., 2008). As of 2010, Facebook users were uploading over 2 billion pictures per month (Stefanone et al., 2011), with younger people and females posting the highest number of photos (Stefanone & Lackaff, 2009). Photosharing was preceded by the development of digital photography. Starting in 2004, digital cameras outsold film cameras (Stefanone et al., 2011). Cameraphones also entered use in COGNITION AND TECHNOLOGY 6 the late 1990s (Miller & Edwards, 2007) and began to outsell stand-alone digital cameras by 2005 (Stefanone et al., 2011). And this recent explosion of online photo-sharing is perhaps even further rooted in photography’s rich history as a social activity. Before digital photography became widespread, people often interacted with physical copies of photos—for example, friends would sit together and view a photo album. Taken together, the simultaneous rise of digital photography and the Internet’s photosharing capabilities has shifted how photos are used socially in modern times. Rather than physical photo albums, social networking sites such as Facebook have become the primary viewing platforms for shared photos. Photo-sharing sites greatly increase the size of one’s potential audience for a photo. As a consequence of photo-sharing sites’ popularity, photo sharing has become a remote, rather than collocated, activity (Lindley et al., 2009). Further, Lampe and colleagues (2008) found that presence of photos on one’s profile were associated with more articulated friendships. People share photos to indicate social presence, inviting a means to communicate with friends and family. Shared photos signal the presence of relationships and events (Counts & Fellheimer, 2004). As a consequence, online photo-sharing through websites such as Facebook allows for an unprecedented, rapid, and immediate spread of social and emotional connections with those around us. Technology and cognition With such a pervasive influence, does technology have the ability to affect cognition? Content delivered through electronic media play an important role in shaping one’s sense of reality. For instance, Internet usage influences people’s perceptions of space. With electronic mail, users can communicate instantly with someone who lives thousands of miles away. News COGNITION AND TECHNOLOGY 7 sites provide real-time accounts of events all over the world. If someone wishes to view some part of the world, an online image search will yield numerous pictures. Internet usage also has the capability to influence people’s sense of time. The speed of communication facilitated by the Internet leads people to expect instantaneous returns when seeking information. This expectation of quick information delivery can lead Internet users to feel anxious when their information inquiries are not met immediately. Consequently, people feel a need for instant gratification, and feel frustrated by information that takes longer to process. For example, teachers have reported that students now