Information Technology is Changing People's Transactive Memory

Transactive Memory Theory was proposed by Wegner (1986). He considers that in addition to the memory owned by the individual, human has the ability to store memory with the aid of the external reality. Such externally stored memories contain messages that people rely on the memories of one and another other than memorandums and directory data. For instance, John has no idea of Mary's birthday, but he knows Jane remembers it. Therefore, he can know Mary's birthday by asking Jane instead of memorizing it by himself. In the studies for nearly 30 years in the past, the transactive memory theory proposed by Wegner (1986) has almost been applied to the level of the team. However, with the advancement of information technology and popularity of Internet, transactive memory is no longer limited to discussion of team work; rather, it can be further applied to studies in the individual level, just like Google effect and Cloud application.

Keywords: Google effect, Knowledge management, Mental model, Transactive memory systems.