People shift cognitive work onto the environment whenever doing so is cheaper than doing it internally, and thereby lose the internal capability.
Risko and Gilbert's 2016 review treats note-taking, rotating the page, setting reminders and searching rather than recalling as one phenomenon governed by a cost comparison. The offloading is usually rational, and it reliably reduces unaided performance, so the measured decline in memory for offloaded material is a consequence of the strategy rather than evidence of damage.
In practice
- A team that documents thoroughly cannot answer the same questions without the document, which is what documenting bought.
- A driver who has used satellite navigation on a route twenty times cannot describe it.