The Google effect, also referred to as Digital amnesia, comes from a paper published by Betsy Sparrow and Daniel Wegner in 2011 titled, “Google Effects on Memory; Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips.” As you probably guessed from the title, they found people tend to forget things they can easily look up on the internet. We remember where or how to find the information instead of retaining it.
Kaspersky Lab coined the term “digital amnesia” after the results of a 2015 survey revealed the Google effect extended beyond online facts to include personal information. The survey covered 1,000 consumers in the US, who in most cases couldn’t remember important information that should have been familiar because they relied on finding the information stored on their computer or smartphone.
Replication
Like most behavioral science research, the Google effect was one of the experiments that couldn’t be replicated according to a study published in 2018 by Nature titled, “Evaluating the replicability of social experiments in Nature and Science between 2010 and 2015.”