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  3. The Internet may be changing merely what we remember, not our capacity to do so, suggests Columbia University psychology profess

The Internet may be changing merely what we remember, not our capacity to do so, suggests Columbia University psychology profess

admin2023-03-23  31
问题     The Internet may be changing merely what we remember, not our capacity to do so, suggests Columbia University psychology professor Betsy Sparrow. In 2011, Sparrow led a study in which participants were asked to record 40 factoids in a computer ( "an ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain," for example). Half of the participants were told the information would be erased, while the other half were told it would be saved. Guess what? The latter group made no effort to recall the information when quizzed on it later, because they knew they could find it on their computers. In the same study, a group was asked to remember both the information and the folders it was stored in. They didn’t remember the information, but they remembered how to find the folders. In other words, human memory is not deteriorating but "adapting to new communications technology," Sparrow says.
    In a very practical way, the Internet is becoming an external hard drive for our memories, a process known as "cognitive offloading. " Traditionally, this role was fulfilled by data banks, libraries, and other humans. Your father may never remember birthdays because your mother does, for instance. Some worry that this is having a destructive effect on society, but Sparrow sees an upside. Perhaps, she suggests, the trend will change our approach to learning from a focus on individual facts and memorization to an emphasis on more conceptual thinking—something that is not available on the Internet. " I personally have never seen all that much intellectual value in memorizing things," Sparrow says, adding that we haven’t lost our ability to do it.
    Still other experts say it’s too soon to understand how the Internet affects our brains. There is no experimental evidence showing that it interferes with our ability to focus, for instance, wrote psychologists Christopher Chabris and Daniel J. Simons. And surfing the web exercised the brain more than reading did among computer-savvy older adults in a 2008 study involving 24 participants at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at the University of California, Los Angeles.
    "There may be costs associated with our increased reliance on the Internet, but I’d have to imagine that overall the benefits are going to outweigh those costs," observes psychology professor Benjamin Storm. "It seems pretty clear that memory is changing, but is it changing for the better? At this point, we don’t know. "
It is indicated in Paragraph 3 that how the Internet affects our brains________.
选项 A、requires further academic research
B、is most studied in older adults
C、is reflected in our reading speed
D、depends on our web-surfing habits
答案A
解析 推断题。根据题干定位到第三段前两句。其中提到其他专家表示，现在说了解了互联网如何影响我们的大脑还为时过早。心理学家克里斯多弗.查布里斯和丹尼尔.J.西蒙斯写道，没有实验证据表明互联网会干扰我们专注的能力。也就是说，有专家认为互联网对大脑的影响仍需进一步的实验研究，故正确答案为A。第三段后面提到了一个研究，其中研究对象为老年人，但是这并不代表研究对象大都是老年人，故排除选项B。该实验的实验结果为上网比阅读更能锻炼大脑，选项C和D属于对文中内容的曲解，故均排除。
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