Cognitive Offloading - defined as the use of external resources to minimize cognitive demand - is used during the time age of advancing technology as a common way to solve problems. However, using external resources to reduce cognitive load always implies an additional action and therefore physical effort to execute it. How physical effort influences the decision process of selecting one strategy is not yet understood. Through Mouse Tracking and common dependent variables a deeper understanding of this strategy selection process is accomplished.
An extension of the mental rotation paradigm was used. It allowed participants to rotate stimuli either internally or by manually clicking on a button on the computer screen that afforded rotating stimuli externally on the screen. Three parameters were manipulated: The angle at which the stimulus was presented, the presentation format and the speed with which a manually rotated stimulus could be turned.
Participants used cognitive offloading more often, when the presentation angle approached 180° and when the stimuli were mirrored. Against our predictions, the rotation speed did not influence the amount of offloading. This seems to be a result of an unintuitive use of the mouse. For either solving the task and rotating the stimuli the mouse had to be used with varying mapping of the left and right mouse button.
The paradigm seems to be a considerable way of investigating the effects of physical effort on cognitive offloading. However physical effort should be operationalized more realistically, and the design needs to altered to minimize confounds.