Taking photographs for Instagram or Snapchat to document and remember a memorable experience may be counterproductive, say scientists who found that the act of clicking pictures impairs people's memories of the event.
"People think that taking a photo will help them remember something better, but it's actually quite the contrary," said Julia Soares, doctoral student at University of California, Santa Cruz.
In a set of experiments, researchers invited people to a virtual museum tour where they looked at paintings on computer screens, knowing they would be tested on what they saw.
Researchers compared how well participants remembered the paintings following three scenarios: when they just looked at the images; when they looked and took pictures using a camera phone; and when they took pictures using Snapchat.
The picture-takers consistently scored worse - by as much as 20 per cent - on multiple choice tests about what they had seen.
Soares thought that the result could be chalked up to the phenomenon known as "cognitive off-loading" - that is, not remembering as well because you know the camera is there to remember for you.
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Even people who took pictures using Snapchat - in which images last only 10 seconds - remembered less. People who were asked to take a picture and then delete the image, also did worse.
"Whenever they used a camera, they were less likely to remember as well as when they just observed," Soares said.
By stepping out of the moment to take a picture, people become less focused on what's in front of them, a phenomenon Soares termed "attentional disengagement."
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