Impact of smartphone photography on memory: visual recognition memory after exposure to direct image and mediated image of artworks

Unprecedented access and frequent use of smartphone cameras is not only reconstructing the way we communicate and share, but also the way we remember. Previous work has shown that photographing a scene can have detrimental effects on memory. In a set of experiments, we investigated whether the act of taking photographs with a smartphone led to poorer memory. Participants were presented a mock museum tour. Differently from real life museum tours, this made it possible to control for confounding variables potentially undetected in previous research. Participants were directed to merely observe the artworks or to photograph them depending on the group they were assigned to. In the first two experiments we manipulated encoding condition. In Experiment 1, intentional encoding took place such that participants were informed before the tour of a later memory test. The procedure was identical in Experiment 2, except that that time participants underwent a surprise recognition test. The results of Experiment 1 revealed that taking many photos impaired participants’ accuracy in remembering, whereas this impairment effect was eliminated in Experiment 2. This suggests that knowing in advance about a memory task creates itself the impairment by possibly affecting the retrieval strategies. Furthermore, photo groups in both experiments gave lower confidence ratings compared to no-photo groups, suggesting that photo taking makes people uncertain about what they remember. In Experiment 3, we aimed to replicate the photo-taking-impairment effect while testing for the effect of encoding by presenting for half of the retrieval cues only partial details of the original paintings. Overall, presenting only details impaired memory, and more importantly, the impairment effect was confirmed. However, no interaction was found with type of cues. Considered together, these results suggest that taking many photos does not impair encoding, while it seems to affect metacognitive variables at retrieval, such as confidence in memory and retrieval strategies. Further studies will examine this possibility directly.