Age group and experience impact partial cognitive offloading for value-based remembering.

Abstract

Older adults have impaired episodic memory abilities, but they can remember high-value information just as well as young adults and exhibit improved performance on memory-based tasks via cognitive offloading. For young adults, benefits from offloading a subset of memoranda (i.e., partial offloading) stem from both using the external memory aid to access offloaded information and better memory for nonoffloaded information, termed the saving-enhanced memory effect. Whether older adults also exhibit a saving-enhanced memory benefit from offloading is not yet known. The present study investigated if and how young and older adults' partial cognitive offloading behaviors and the benefits conferred by partial offloading change following experience with this strategy. Across two experiments, participants studied lists of words associated with varying point values under both internal memory and partial offloading conditions with the goal of earning as many points as possible on a subsequent free recall test. Participants chose a subset of words to offload before and after receiving three trials of direct instruction (Experiment 1) or extended practice (Experiment 2) using partial offloading. Across experiments, experience with partial offloading improved overall performance for both young and older adults. However, even after acquiring experience using partial offloading, young adults, but not older adults, exhibited better memory for nonsaved items, akin to the saving-enhanced memory effect. Thus, older adults benefitted from the use of an external memory aid, but internal memory resources freed up by offloading were not effectively rededicated to remembering nonoffloaded information as has been observed in young adults. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).