The Cost of Saving: How Photos and Screenshots Impair Memory

Abstract

The photo impairment effect refers to worse memory for events that are photographed versus experienced without being photographed. One explanation for the effect is that photo-taking divides attention between the event and the actions required for photography. However, the results of this study provide evidence against this account. Our results show that the magnitude of the impairment did not increase with task complexity, contradicting the idea of divided attention as the primary cause. In three experiments, participants viewed, photographed, or took screenshots of art on a computer, a provided tablet, or their own smartphones. Memory was consistently worse for images saved by any of these methods. Notably, the effects of screenshotting were particularly deleterious to memory, in spite of it being judged as the least complex and attention-demanding of the different saving methods. Similarly, we found no evidence that the magnitude of the impairment depended on whether the photos were taken with a familiar device (the participants own smartphone) or an unfamiliar experimenter-provided camera. The results are inconsistent with a divided attention account, but are aligned with accounts based on cognitive offloading or attentional disengagement.