Wed 12 Aug 2026

Sparrow, Liu, and Wegner (Science, 2011) demonstrated that when people expect information to remain externally available, they encode the content itself less but encode its location more — a transactive memory effect. This cognitive offloading is currently gated by trust in platform persistence: cloud services can delete, alter, or revoke access silently, introducing a discount on reliance. Cryptographically timestamped memory on immutable ledgers removes that trust discount — if the transactive memory model holds, verifiable external memory should produce measurably stronger offloading effects than platform-dependent memory, because the risk of silent alteration drops to zero.

Not submitted.