How mindful and mindless online searching affects curiosity and information recall

Abstract With the advancement of technology and the internet, individuals offload their cognitive demands onto the internet to access information and supplement their cognitive capacity. However, heavy reliance on the internet often produces undesirable consequences such as poor metacognitive judgments and memory retention. This study investigated whether these negative effects can be mitigated by making learners more cognitively mindful of their search activities. A total of 104 undergraduate students were randomly assigned to two conditions. In the thinking-before-googling condition, participants had to first generate or guess answers to three brainstorming questions about modern pentathlon, a topic unfamiliar to most college students, before searching to find answers to 15 more specific problems on it. In the googling-only condition, participants were instead shown a keyword slide and immediately started searching the internet for the same 15 problems. The thinking-before-googling group demonstrated significantly higher pre-search curiosity and recall performance compared to the googling-only group. However, no significant group differences emerged in cognitive self-esteem and the estimation of performance and study time. Both groups expressed significantly higher interest in the topic after the search compared to before. Curiosity is discussed as the potential psychological mechanism underlying the benefits of the thinking-before-googling group.