Our memory is worse for things we've photographed - even when we've taken multiple photos

Many of us know that taking a photograph of something hinders rather than helps our memory of it. Linda Henkel first reported this ‘photo-taking-impairment’ effect back in 2014. Since then, a wealth of studies have supported it.

This research has generally involved participants taking just a single photo of an object. But given how easy it is to take lots of pictures with a phone, how often do you restrict yourself to just one shot? Perhaps taking multiple photos lessens the memory impairment — or, alternatively, perhaps it encourages us to feel even less responsibility for remembering what we’re looking at, making our memory of it even worse.

In a new paper in the Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, Julia S Shares at Mississippi State University and Benjamin C Storm at UC Santa Cruz report their investigation of this, using three lab-based studies on a total of about 400 participants.

In the first study, the participants were told that they would be taking a visual memory test after viewing a series of 30 paintings on a screen. When each painting was presented, they were told to just observe it, or use a smartphone to take one photo of it, or to take five photos of it. The test consisted of 60 multiple choice questions about details of the paintings (two for each painting). The results showed that the participants had a poorer memory for paintings that they had taken five photos of vs none — so even when taking lots of photos, the memory impairment effect was still evident. (In this study, the results didn’t in fact show an impairment when one photo was taken.)

The second study replicated the first, except that each painting was shown for ten seconds (rather than 20) and the participants were split into three groups: one group never took a photo, a second group always took just one photo, and a third group always took five photos. In this study, both the photo-taking groups did worse on the memory test than the group that only observed the painting (though those who took one photo did worse than those who took five). This is the first time that the photo-taking-impairment effect has been reported in a study that compared separate groups, rather than the same people doing different things, the researchers write.

The final study was the same as the second, except that the participants in the five-photo group were asked to take five unique photos — so to focus on different aspects of the painting. These participants still did worse on the memory test than those who’d only observed the images.

Across the three studies, then, the researchers consistently found that taking multiple photos impaired memory, though it’s unclear from the results as a whole whether taking lots of pictures is worse or better than taking one. The finding “reinforces the robustness of the photo-taking-impairment effect,” they write.

What this means for theories of why the memory impairment happens is less clear. One idea is that when we take a photo of something, we effectively offload the task of storing that image. However, all the participants knew that they would be taking a memory test afterwards — they knew that they’d have to rely on their own memories of the paintings — and yet the memory effect was still apparent.

Another idea is that when we take a photo of something, we disengage with whatever we’re looking at, resulting in poorer memory of it. If this is the cause of the photo-taking-impairment effect, this new work shows that even taking many different photos can’t prevent it — though it may not make it any worse.

In her original work, Henkel found that zooming in on the subject of the photo attenuated the memory effect. (In this study, participants took photos or simply observed objects in a museum). It seems, then, that there are ways to reduce the memory effect — even if taking lots of pictures isn’t one of them. Future research might explore whether other factors, such as using a portrait rather than standard photo mode, might also help to prevent the effect. But the researchers aren’t particularly optimistic. “Indeed, we found the photo-taking-impairment to be robust in a new variety of situations, suggesting the effect may not be easily avoided”.