The influence of symbolic literacy on memory: Testing plate's hypothesis

The present study examined the influence of the production of external symb ols on memory strategies. Plate hypothesized that dependency on writing as an external memory store would be detrimental to memory. Three experiments were conducted to explore this hypothesis. Participants played Concentratio n, a memory game where players must find matching pairs of cards placed fac e down in an array. Participants were allowed to make notes to aid their pe rformance under some experimental conditions, while under other conditions they could not. In Experiments 1 and 2, the unexpected removal of participa nts' notes revealed that the performance benefit was due to notes acting as a form of external memory storage, rather than as an aid to encoding infor mation in memory. Experiment 3 qualified these findings by demonstrating th at the identity of each card was retained in memory, while the location of each card tended to be stored in the participants' external notations. Thes e data suggest a modified interpretation of Plate's hypothesis in that symb olic literacy may change how we remember information. Rather than storing a ll information in memory, we only have to retain the information necessary to use the much larger storage capacity of the external system. Thus, the i ntroduction of external symbols allows for a change in how memory is adapti vely distributed.