"Thus it appears that believing that one won't have access to the information in the future enhances memory for the information itself," the paper stated. In other words, if someone knows that information may be found on the Internet, he or she may be less likely to commit that information to memory.

Another experiment was conduct to determine if people prefer to memorize the locations of where they could find data in favor of remembering the data itself. Here, 32 participants were presented with a number of statements, along with the names of folders in which these bits of information would be saved. Then, they were asked to recall as much of the information as possible and were then quizzed on which folder each piece of information was in.

Overall, participants were better able to recall which folder each bit of information was stored in than the information itself.

Such results shouldn't alarm people, Sparrow cautioned. "I don't think that the parts of our brain that can remember information are atrophied," she said. While the Internet is fairly new, the act of relying on external resources for memory is not new for humans. People have long relied on friends, co-workers and family to keep track of information that they themselves have forgotten. The researchers call this phenomena "transactive memory."

"We've always done this sort of thing, allowed certain types of information to be stored with other people," Sparrow said. "Computers and access to online information work in similar ways."