Your camera roll remembers everything. You, it seems, may remember a little less. Picture this: a museum on a quiet afternoon, a painting you love, and the reflex to lift your phone before you have even really looked. Most of us do it. Some people don’t. They stand there, take it in, and walk on. If that is you, you may be keeping more of the moment than everyone else in the room.
Fairfield University psychologist Linda Henkel tested exactly this. In a study published in the journal Psychological Science, she took undergraduate students on a guided tour of the university’s Bellarmine Museum of Art. They were asked to note certain objects, either by photographing them or by simply observing them. The next day, their memory was tested.
The Photo-Taking Impairment Effect
The results were striking. Students were less accurate at recognizing the objects they had photographed, and they could answer fewer questions about those objects’ visual details, than the ones they had only looked at. Henkel gave the phenomenon a name: the “photo-taking impairment effect.”
“These results show how the ‘mind’s eye’ and the camera’s eye are not the same,” she said. One way to read it: when we trust the ...