When stripped of internet access, we may be far stupider than we like to imagine, new research suggests.

Internet users frequently confuse what they know with what they only just read on the internet, a recent study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology reports.

Even if the participants in the study previously could not answer a question, they immediately said they knew it after reading the answer online, as if they had known it all along.

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“It becomes easier to confuse your own knowledge with this external source,” Yale University lead researcher Matthew Fisher explained.

“When people are truly on their own, they may be wildly inaccurate about how much they know and how dependent they are on the Internet.”

This exaggerated knowledge based on search engines could have ‘big consequences’, Mr Fisher warned.

“In cases where decisions have big consequences, it could be important for people to distinguish their own knowledge and not assume they know something when they actually don’t,” he said.

“The internet is an enormous benefit in countless ways, but there may be some trade-offs that aren’t immediately obvious and this may be one of them.

“Accurate personal knowledge is difficult to achieve, and the internet may be making that task even harder.”