The mind online: can digital technologies affect how we think?

Abstract

The internet and its applications have changed how we seek, process and share information. The paper addresses the question of how the digital expansion of the mind can affect cognition and has two key aims: The first is to explore whether and how our cognitive processes differ when we are online and when offline. The second is to focus on the impact of digital technologies on human attention, memory, decision-making, and problem-solving. We attempt to explain and discuss phenomena, such as multitasking and task switching, use of the internet to support and extend our memory, the development and use of a variety of heuristic-based strategies to search for information online, and making judgements about the credibility of information, among others.

Keywords

• mind
• Internet
• cognitive processes
• attention
• memory
• decision making