Cognitive offloading as a strategy to ease working memory overload

Cognitive offloading by notetaking is a valuable strategy to support working memory performance. This is especially true when the required mental load of a task exceeds one's working memory capacity. The present study replicates recent examinations of offloading during an ongoing working memory task (see Morrison & Richmond, 2020; Richmond et al., 2025) and extends this earlier work by emphasizing offloading during working memory overload and the incidence of errors in offloading. We administered the Letter String Offloading Task with set sizes of four, eight, and 12 letters. In one condition, participants could offload letters by typing notes that they could use when reporting the items. In the other, they completed the task with no notetaking or memory aid available during recall. As predicted, performance declined as the set size increased and improved with the choice to offload information compared to without offloading. Further, the benefits of offloading increased with set size and were the largest at set size 12. Participants offloaded more frequently at higher loads. However, they also made more offloading-related errors by incorrectly copying information or incorrectly reading and/or reporting notes when tested. Individual difference factors relating to offloading frequency were examined with no significant findings. We conclude that offloading is a useful, if imperfect, strategy for performance during working memory overload and suggest that future work evaluate methods of optimizing offloading during cognitive overload.