What happens to memory for lecture content when students take photos of the lecture slides?

Abstract

Students often take photos of slides during lectures. Research on the photo-taking-impairment effect suggests that this behavior could impair memory for lecture content, whereas other work suggests that photo-taking could cause memory benefits, at least for visually presented information. Two experiments examined the effect of photographing lecture slides on memory for information that appeared on the lecture slides as well as information only spoken aloud by the lecturer. In Experiment 1, participants were assigned to take photos of some lecture slides, but not others, before being tested on memory for the material. Experiment 2 employed a yoked design in which half of the participants took photos of slides volitionally, whereas the other half were assigned to photograph the same slides nonvolitionally. Across both experiments, a photo-taking benefit was observed for on-slide information, regardless of volition condition. These findings contrasted with participants' metacognitive judgments of when taking a photo would benefit their memory.

Comparing functions of and recollection with recently taken and recently deleted smartphone camera photos

“…Indeed, photo‐taking goals could help elucidate the mixed literature examining photo‐taking effects on memory. Some studies have indicated that photo‐taking can impair memory for photographed information (Henkel, 2014; Lurie & Westerman, 2021; Soares & Storm, 2018, 2022b), while others have found the opposite effect: that photo taking benefits memory for photographed information (Barasch et al, 2017; Ditta et al, 2023). It is possible that taking photos with different goals in mind or in different situations could trigger different cognitive processes and result in different memory effects of photo taking.…”

Turn off, tune out? Testing the effects of webcam use on learning in synchronous online classrooms.

“…All materials are available on the Open Science Framework (Ramirez Perez et al, 2023). Two lectures about printmaking and cheesemaking were adapted from Ditta et al (2023). The lectures consisted of a slideshow with 11 slides (not including any quiz slides) for each topic and a script that was delivered live by the experimenter who screen-shared the slides during each session.…”