Baike Li

Who they are

The credit rule comes first on this page, because it is the mistake this paper invites. Sam Gilbert, at the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, is one of the principals of the cognitive-offloading literature and is the name a reader is likely to recognise. He is second author. Baike Li is first, Meng Liu is corresponding, and the paper is Li's to be credited with. The full authorship is Li, Gilbert, Yu, Ju, Tang, Yang and Liu, in press at the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, doi:10.1037/mac0000287, with data at osf.io/hg73f, and funding from the Natural Science Foundation of China and of Liaoning Province.

The study runs three experiments on a Liaoning Normal University participant pool, roughly 60 to 68 participants each, with preregistered sequential-Bayes stopping rules and, in the second experiment, a preregistered minimum of 30 per group. The first experiment replicated the photo-impairment effect, with photographed items recognised less accurately than observed ones. That is now at least a third independent replication, and it is the reason the effect cannot be described as a casualty of the replication crisis.

The second experiment tested the attentional account by comparing a full smartphone photograph against a single press of a Bluetooth shutter button. If the impairment is caused by the attentional cost of operating a device, stripping the act down to one button press should reduce or remove it. It did not. Their abstract says the persistence of the impairment challenges the attentional-disengagement hypothesis. They report, carefully, that the more effortful task did produce a somewhat larger effect, d = 0.26 with a confidence interval of 0.05 to 0.47, and call that difference relatively modest themselves.

The third experiment is the one that matters for the mechanism. It manipulated expected access, telling one group of participants the photographs would be available afterwards and the other that they would not. The impairment appeared in the accessible group, F(1, 66) = 7.668, p = .006, and was eliminated in the inaccessible group. Their conclusion is that the effect depends on beliefs about future access to stored information rather than arising solely from the demands of the act.

That result puts the paper in direct contradiction with Julia Soares and Benjamin Storm, who removed future access twice, through Snapchat and through immediate deletion, and found the impairment survived at full size. Both studies are preregistered or power-planned, both are honest about their own limits, both are in the same journal, and they point opposite ways on the same manipulation. The right thing to do with that is print both, which is what this publication does. Li and colleagues quote and engage Soares and Storm directly in their own text rather than ignoring them.

One honesty note about how this paper was read. The accepted manuscript was retrieved from an open repository and searched for the abstract, the three experiments' condition means and the discussion of Soares and Storm. The full General Discussion was not read, so nothing on this page describes what that section argues.

Key papers

Li is a working memory researcher at an early-career stage whose output is journal articles. This publication has verified no book of his and lists the paper instead rather than padding the page.

Li, B., Gilbert, S. J., Yu, Y., Ju, Y., Tang, B., Yang, C., & Liu, M. (in press). "Photo-Taking Impairment in Recognition Memory: Comparing Attentional Disengagement and Cognitive Offloading Accounts." Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition. doi:10.1037/mac0000287. Three preregistered experiments. Data at osf.io/hg73f. The repository copy gives the publication year as 2026.

Key ideas

A third independent replication of the photo-impairment effect, under preregistration.

The impairment survives a Bluetooth button press, which removes most of the operational demand an attentional account would need, and the authors say this challenges the attentional-disengagement hypothesis.

The impairment is eliminated when participants believe the photographs will be inaccessible, which points at beliefs about future access rather than at the act itself.

That finding contradicts Soares and Storm on the same manipulation, and the contradiction is currently unresolved.

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