Study: People who take pictures of art remember less about the works than those who don’t

10 years ago

“As museums swarm with visitors snapping photos in their galleries, new research suggests people who take pictures of art with their camera phones remember less about the works than those who don’t,” Ellen Gamerman reports for The Wall Street Journal.

“A study released last week found that people remember 10 percent fewer objects and roughly 12 percent fewer details about the objects they’ve seen if they’ve photographed them rather than simply looked at them,” Gamerman reports. “‘When you press click on that button for the camera, you’re sending a signal to your brain saying, ‘I’ve just outsourced this, the camera is going to remember this for me,” said Linda Henkel, a psychology professor at Fairfield University in Connecticut, who led the study. ‘The photos are trophies. You want to show people where you were rather than saying, ‘Hey, this is important, I want to remember this.””

Gamerman reports, “Ms. Henkel calls the resulting memory gap the ‘photo-taking impairment effect.'”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: We don’t need no stinikin’ studies! As we just wrote yesterday in a Take about Apple’s “Misunderstood” ad:

Over the past year or so, we’ve taken to NOT recording our childrens’ dance recitals, skiing trips, concerts, and everything else precisely because we found that we couldn’t really remember very well what happened. There’s a time and a place to record video and shoot stills, but it’s definitely not all the time.

We’ve gone back to experiencing the moment with our organic hardware instead of holding an iPhone between our eyeballs and life.

You should, too.