Music Tagging and Listening: Testing the Memory Cue Hypothesis in a Collaborative Tagging System

Humans possess a unique capacity to manipulate the environment in the pursuit

of goals. These goals can be physical (building shelter, creating tools, etc.), but

also informational, such as when we create markers to point the way along a path

or leave a note to ourselves as a reminder to pick up eggs from the market. In

the informational case, the creation of reminders or pointers in the environment

functions as a kind of cognitive offloading, enriching our modes of interaction with

the environment while requiring reduced internal management of information.