Author(s): Annu and Poonam Malik

Abstract:
Cognitive offloading refers to the act of reducing the requirement of mental processing of a task through the use of external environment. For instance, write down the crucial information on piece of paper, set reminders for upcoming appointments and make a shopping list. Offloading play a significant role in enhance the performance during the task with high level of cognitive requirement such as multiple pieces of information in task must be simultaneously maintained. The offloading relies on metacognition- is becoming aware of one’s cognition, thinking and is high order thinking skills. The people opt to use cognitive offloading depends on metacognitive evaluation of their mental abilities. Through the depiction of metacognitive evaluation, people find high memory load that leads to greater professed difficulty of remembering, then people decide to use external storage to reduce the internal demands. The frequency of use of cognitive offloading strategies increases as the increase of cognitive demand or memory load. The cognitive offloading improves the performance on the short term and perspective memory.