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By Michael Irving - Source: ScienceAlert
Chances are you have thousands of photos on your phone right now — and you rarely look at them.
Selfies at parties. Brunch spreads carefully staged for Instagram. Your cat sleeping in slightly different positions. Sunsets, supermoons, and travel snaps.
One of the main reasons we take photos is to help us remember an experience or event. But it turns out that stopping to snap a selfie could actually make it harder to remember what happened.
That sounds counterintuitive — surely a visual cue should make recall easier, right? Yet a growing body of research keeps finding that this isn’t the case.
A new study, published in Memory & Cognition, adds to the evidence: across seven experiments, participants’ memory was consistently worse after taking screenshots.
“The results of the current study suggest that we are likely harming our memory for information and experiences with the press of a button, and that this impairment may even extend beyond what is captured,” says Sophia Fabrizio, a psychologist at Binghamton University.
The idea that taking photos can reduce our ability to remember is not new — the effect has appeared in studies for decades. But exactly why the so-called “photo-taking impairment effect” occurs remains unclear.
Scientists have proposed several explanations. One is that using a camera or phone divides attention or pulls you out of the moment, so your brain devotes fewer resources to encoding the experience.
The leading hypothesis, though, is “cognitive offloading” — your brain may put in less effort to remember something if it expects the information to be stored elsewhere, in this case as a photograph.
Whether that decision is conscious or unconscious doesn’t seem to matter.
It’s similar to the “Google effect” — why bother storing information in your head when you can find it in seconds online? That’s why many of us no longer memorize phone numbers, instead relying on the contacts list on our phones.
To test these ideas, the Binghamton team studied 892 participants across seven experiments, each probing a different aspect of the phenomenon. The broad result was the same.
Participants consistently performed worse on memory tests after snapping images.
In the first experiment, participants viewed 44 images of artwork on their phones and were asked either to screenshot each one or simply view it. After a 10-minute distraction task, they took a memory test, identifying the original images from three similar variations of each.
An example of a question from the memory-test portion of the experiment. (Fabrizio et al., Mem. Cogn., 2026)
Participants consistently performed worse on images they had screenshotted than on images they had simply viewed.
The second experiment tested whether there was any trade-off — some benefit that might offset the memory deficit. This time, the researchers added a question at the end, asking participants whether they remembered viewing or screenshotting each image.
Again, participants remembered less about the images they had screenshotted.
The next experiments explored whether those cognitive resources were being redirected elsewhere. Participants completed math problems or memory tasks unrelated to the images.
However, there were few signs that participants who screenshotted images performed any better on those tasks than participants who only viewed them.
In later experiments, the researchers examined what happened when participants were explicitly told they would take a memory test and would have a chance to review their screenshots.
Some participants were told they would be tested within 30 minutes; others were told they would return a month later. In reality, both groups were tested 10 minutes after the image session.
The team hypothesized that participants expecting a longer delay before the test would rely more on cognitive offloading than those expecting an immediate test.
Intriguingly, there was little difference between the groups. Participants in both conditions continued to show weaker memory for images they had screenshotted than for images they had viewed.
“In sum, the present study suggests a pronounced memory impairment associated with screenshotting, with only modest benefits to subsequent learning observed under very circumscribed conditions and measures of memory performance,” the study authors conclude.
It’s a complicated area of research — after all, other studies have suggested that taking photos does aid your memory.
Either way, it’s enough to make you hesitate the next time you reach for your phone.
While few people miss memorizing phone numbers, the potential loss feels much more personal if getting too snap-happy means we’re harming our ability to remember life milestones like weddings, birthdays, and vacations.
The research was published in the journal Memory & Cognition.
This article was fact-checked by Rachel Garner and edited by Rebecca Dyer. While we pride ourselves on our process, we are only human. If you spot a mistake, please let us know.
