Background:

The advent of the Internet, with sophisticated algorithmic search engines, has made accessing information as easy as lifting a finger.¹ The Internet and Internet–enabled devices have transformed our everyday lives and relationships. We entrust them with our precious personal information including contacts and images and rely on them to connect us to a vast repository of knowledge, anytime, anywhere.² People are beginning to use the internet and computers as a transactive memory system, and this use is changing the way people encounter and treat information.³

Aims and Objectives:

1. To study the effects of use of smartphones and internet on short term memory, mainly recognition and recall in medical students.

2. To suggest suitable recommendation s based on the findings.

Materials and Methods:

A cross sectional study was carried out in a tertiary healthcare center among medical students. The participants underwent three tasks in a sequential manner. These were 1) Typing task 2) Memory–recall task and 3) Recall–recognition task. The typing task consisted of typing trivial statements displayed on a computer screen using a keyboard. The memory–recall task was a pen and paper free recall task, in which the subjects were told to write down the entire statements or a part of statement they remember from the typing task. In the last recall recognition task some of the statements from the typing task were shown to the participants, of which half were slightly modified and the participants were asked to recognize which statements were changed and which were unchanged.

Results:

In memory recall task combined mean score for templates of ‘will be saved’ types was 4.08 ±1.83 and for templates of ‘will be erased’ types, it was 6.64 ±1.73. Similarly in recall recognition task combined mean score for templates of ‘will be saved’ types was 5.55 ± 2.66 and for templates of ‘will be erased’ types, it was 8.78 ± 1.4. In both memory recall task and recall recognition tasks, the mean scores for templates of ‘will be erased’ types for  both for male and female medical students were significantly more than that for templates of ‘will be saved’ types.

Conclusion:

The study concludes that medical students make fewer efforts to remember the information which they expect to be stored in their digital devices. Thus smartphones and internet services have effects on the short term memory of medical students. This study further concludes that the phenomenon of directed forgetting has now extended and is applicable for digital appliances as well.