(998 words, 5-minute read)
“Could you watch the pot for me?” is a sentence my flatmates and I say to each other on the regular. Even without putting in any physical help, they’re doing me a favor: not having to keep a mental tab on whether my braised short-ribs are going up in flames, gives me the peace of mind to chop scallions without cutting my fingers, or to season my stir-fry with just the right amount of everything. That seamless division of mental labour is called social offloading.
Of course, this doesn’t just happen in the kitchen. From doctors in an operating room to pilots in a cockpit, or any teamwork scenario you’ve been a part of, you’ve divided the mental load with someone, even if you didn’t realise it. That’s what social offloading is: relying on others to handle other tasks, consciously or not, so you can focus more fully on your own.
Researchers have already explored social offloading in cognitive processes like attention. In one study, when teammates searched a screen together for a target, participants delayed looking at the areas they thought their partner had been looking at—even if this “partner” wasn’t a real person. In other words, they were socially offloading attention to areas they thought their partner had already paid attention to. Participants were trying to coordinate attention with a nonexistent teammate through dividing areas to keep track of, without even having consciously communicated on doing so.
But what happens after that moment of attention? If we assume someone else is keeping track of part of the task and socially offload it, does that shape what we subsequently remember? That’s the research question I set out to answer. Can another person’s social presence change what we hold onto in memory?
Our study: the (not) multiplayer shape-memory game
To explore this, I designed an online game called the “Shape-Memory Game”. Participants saw a two shapes on a screen, followed by a face image that glanced either left or right, towards the location of one of the shapes. A moment later, one shape would reappear, and participants had to decide whether it matched the shape they had seen in that spot before.
Typically, in tasks like these, the shape that was “looked at” tends to be remembered better.That’s no surprise: normally, when something draws your attention, like a glance, you’re more likely to remember what was there.
But here’s where things get interesting. Even though all participants were playing the game alone, we told half of them they were playing alongside someone else. More specifically, to push the narrative that two individuals were performing the exact same task at the exact same time, these participants were convinced that the face they see in the game indicates where the other person is looking in real time. We even staged a brief video call with their so-called playing partner, “Chris,” where they waved hello, and then watched what they believed was a live calibration of each other’s eye movements. It was all carefully designed to make the partner feel real.
(And spoiler alert: it worked. Of the 39 participants who saw this setup, not a single one suspected it.)
I wondered: if someone simply believed in the presence of another player, would that subtly shift their own sense of responsibility enough to change what they remember? Would they treat the looked-at shape as “covered”, and subconsciously offload it from memory?
And we found that…
That’s exactly what seemed to happen.
In the group who knew they were playing alone, the results matched expectations: participants remembered shapes better when the face had looked at them. Just a simple glance was enough to boost memory.
But in the “multiplayer” group, where everything about the task was identical except for the belief that a partner was involved, that effect flipped. Participants were less accurate when the face looked at the shape’s location. Instead, they were more likely to remember the shape on the opposite side.
What does this mean?
To recontextualize: No team objective was ever set by the game. No one was instructed or even nudged to cooperate. In fact, no “playing partner” existed to begin with. Just the belief that someone else might be handling part of the job was enough to change how people allocate their memory, and subsequently, what they remember. Participants socially offloaded the memory of the shape to their “partner” once they believed their partner was looking at it, and remembered it worse because of that.
If our minds can begin sharing responsibility just from the illusion of a teammate, imagine what happens when there’s real coordination. With just a bit more structure—actual communication, shared goals—this kind of cognitive division could easily form what researchers call a transactive memory system: where people in a group each keep track of different things, and the group as a whole remembers more than any one person could.
That’s the promise of good collaboration: 1+1>2. And what our study suggests is that we may be more prepared for it than we think. Teamwork isn’t just about effort or intention. It’s about how we think. Our minds may already be predisposed to attune to others’ minds, ready to work together, even before we realise it.
Final thoughts
Of course, this is just one study. And we only looked at a very short-term kind of memory (working memory), which holds onto information for a few minutes at most. Whether this effect extends to long-term memories, or plays out differently when more complex social factors come into play, is something future research will need to explore.
Still, what we found hints at something bigger: our minds are already tuned for shared thinking. Even in silence, even with strangers, even when the help isn’t real, we subconsciously want to cooperate. And does that say something optimistic about human nature? I’ll let you decide.
References
Nie, Q.-Y., Ding, X., Chen, J., & Conci, M. (2018). Social attention directs working memory maintenance. Cognition, 171, 85–94. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2017.10.025
Tufft, M. R. A., & Gobel, M. S. (2022). Gender and perceived cooperation modulate visual attention in a joint spatial cueing task. Visual Cognition, 30(1–2), 6–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/13506285.2021.1976892
Tufft, M. R. A., & Richardson, D. C. (2020). Social Offloading: Just Working Together is Enough to Remove Semantic Interference. Cognitive Science.
Wegner, D. M. (1987). Transactive Memory: A contemporary analysis of the group mind. In Theories of group behavior (pp. 185–208). Springer New York.
Working Memory | Psychology Today. (n.d.). Retrieved April 24, 2025, from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/subpage/working-memory
Credits
First/cover photo by ShotPot from Pexels: https://www.pexels.com/photo/people-preparing-food-7705355/