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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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Autor principal: Hesselmann, Guido
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: PeerJ Inc. 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7651475/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33194451
http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.10325
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author Hesselmann, Guido
author_facet Hesselmann, Guido
author_sort Hesselmann, Guido
collection PubMed
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.
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spelling pubmed-76514752020-11-12 No conclusive evidence that difficult general knowledge questions cause a “Google Stroop effect”. A replication study Hesselmann, Guido PeerJ Psychiatry and Psychology 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. PeerJ Inc. 2020-11-06 /pmc/articles/PMC7651475/ /pubmed/33194451 http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.10325 Text en ©2020 Hesselmann https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
spellingShingle Psychiatry and Psychology
Hesselmann, Guido
No conclusive evidence that difficult general knowledge questions cause a “Google Stroop effect”. A replication study
title 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_short 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
topic Psychiatry and Psychology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7651475/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33194451
http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.10325
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