#digitalamnesia — Public Fediverse posts
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DATE: September 9, 2026 at 08:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Psychologists find smartphone screenshots can cause a profound degree of “digital amnesia”
New research suggests that taking a screenshot of an image on your smartphone makes you less likely to remember it later, without providing any compensatory boost to your mental bandwidth. A series of experiments indicates that the simple act of capturing an image on a screen triggers a lasting inattention to that experience, leaving people with worse memory for what they just saw. These findings were published in Memory & Cognition.
Psychologists have been exploring how digital devices affect our ability to encode memories. A 2014 study found that taking photos of objects in a museum impaired people’s ability to remember details about those objects compared to simply viewing them. This phenomenon is known as the photo-taking impairment effect.
“The original study on the photo impairment effect intrigued us because it seemed to represent an interesting paradox: We photograph the events that we most want to remember, and yet photographing actually works against that goal,” Sophia P. Fabrizio, a doctoral candidate in cognitive psychology at Binghamton University, and Deanne L. Westerman, a professor of psychology and cognitive and brain sciences at the same institution, told PsyPost.
More recently, a 2025 study extended this memory impairment to modern digital behavior, showing that taking screenshots on a smartphone also hurts memory for visual art. “One idea was that taking photographs diverted attention away from the event being photographed,” the researchers explained. “We reasoned that screenshots are much less attentionally demanding (no need to move the eyes away from the subject, to point the camera, to frame the shot) which may have alleviated the impairment. Instead, we found that the memory impairment from screenshotting was actually larger than that of photographing.”
On a separate track, research into cognitive offloading has explored how we use devices as external memory banks. A 2019 study found that offloading information into a saved digital file can free up mental resources, boosting a person’s performance on subsequent, unrelated cognitive tasks. Cognitive offloading essentially proposes that when we know information is saved elsewhere, our brains dedicate less effort to remembering it.
Fabrizio, Westerman, and their colleagues sought to connect these lines of study. “The current study was a continuation of this line of work, asking whether there are any cognitive benefits that could be found, which might be expected if using the camera/phone as an external memory frees up cognitive resources that could be applied elsewhere,” they said. The team wanted to know if screenshotting acts as a form of automatic cognitive offloading. If taking a screenshot signals to the brain that an image is safely stored, the brain might disengage from remembering it.
This disengagement could free up cognitive resources, offering measurable mental benefits on other tasks that might offset the initial memory penalty. To test this idea, the researchers conducted seven separate experiments with undergraduate students.
In the first experiment, 33 participants used their own smartphones to look at 44 different pieces of visual art. An app instructed them to either simply view the art or take a screenshot of it. Afterward, the participants completed a brief coloring task as a distraction, followed by a memory test on a computer.
For the test, they were shown the original art piece alongside two very similar decoy images and had to identify the one they had seen. The participants recognized the viewed images at high rates, but their memory for the screenshotted images was substantially worse.
The second experiment, involving 69 students, replicated this setup but added a source memory test. After trying to identify the correct art piece, participants had to report whether they had originally viewed or screenshotted that specific image. A central feature of cognitive offloading is knowing where information is stored.
“An important idea behind taking photos and screenshots is that you know that you have them and can access them later if you want to review the experience,” the researchers said. “However, the results of our second experiment suggest that we may not even remember that we have that image saved on our devices. This makes the captured information potentially useless!”
Indeed, participants showed poor source memory for the screenshotted items. They correctly remembered whether an item was viewed or screenshotted for only 53.5 percent of the screenshotted art, compared to 71.3 percent for the viewed art. General item recognition also dropped, falling from 78 percent for viewed images to 69.5 percent for screenshotted ones. This indicates that screenshotting impairs memory for the broader context of an experience, not just the visual details.
The third experiment tested whether screenshotting frees up mental bandwidth for a different kind of task. The researchers divided 129 students into two groups. One group screenshotted 32 pieces of art, while the other group only viewed them. Immediately afterward, both groups were given one minute to solve difficult modular math problems.
If screenshotting offloads mental effort, the screenshot group should have had more cognitive resources available to solve the math problems. Instead, the researchers found no statistical difference in math performance between the two groups. When later tested on their memory of the art, the screenshot group again performed much worse than the viewing group.
In the fourth and fifth experiments, the scientists investigated whether screenshotting one set of images would boost memory for a second set of images. The idea was that offloading the first set might reduce mental clutter, making it easier to learn new information. In the fourth experiment, 126 participants either screenshotted a block of art and then viewed a second block, or simply viewed both blocks.
There was no difference in how well the two groups remembered the second block of art. The fifth experiment switched the memory test from multiple-choice recognition to a written recall test, using simple black-and-white drawings of everyday objects. The researchers found a tiny improvement in memory for the second block of images among the screenshotters, but only when the memory test was scored using very lenient criteria. Overall, the memory cost of screenshotting far outweighed any minor learning benefits.
The final two experiments aimed to see if changing participants’ expectations would encourage them to use screenshotting as a deliberate offloading strategy. In previous experiments, participants did not know their memory would be tested. In the sixth experiment, with 105 participants, half were told in advance that there would be a memory test. Knowing about the test did not change the results; memory was still worse for the screenshotted images.
The seventh experiment involved 179 students and took this a step further. Participants were falsely promised they could review their screenshots before the memory test. Half were told the test would happen at the end of the session, while the other half were told the test would happen in a month.
The researchers hypothesized that participants expecting a month-long delay would rely heavily on their screenshots, resulting in a larger memory drop. However, the memory deficit for screenshotted images was similar across both groups. This suggests that the memory impairment is not driven by a conscious, strategic choice to rely on the device.
Instead of a strategic offloading process, the findings point toward a general disengagement of attention. The physical act of taking a screenshot, or the mental categorization of the event as “captured,” seems to interrupt the brain’s natural encoding process. People tend to stop paying close attention to the details and the context of the image, leading to a profound degree of digital amnesia.
“We have actually been surprised by the size of the effect,” the researchers noted. “The effect sizes are generally in the medium to large range suggesting that the results are likely to be noticeable in everyday life.”
“This is especially surprising for screenshots, since this is a very well-practiced and simple task for our college undergraduates,” they added. “Participants in the study never have to look away from the art to capture it with the press of a couple buttons, and they are given as much time as they want to look at each art piece. This suggests that the effect may be operating unconsciously and automatically: Even when we tell people that there will be a test, they do not appear to be able to counteract the reduced attention that seems to occur when taking a photograph or screenshot.”
As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind. “This is also something that has primarily been investigated in healthy young adults enrolled in colleges and universities, examining memory in the lab with stimuli that are likely not personally meaningful or emotional,” the researchers explained. “This makes it difficult to draw conclusions with any certainty about whether this effect is present for young children or older adults in naturalistic settings where the captured information is deeply meaningful to the individual.”
“That being said, the fact that the effect is found when most everything else is controlled for, suggests that there is something about the act of taking a photograph or screenshot that may be cause for concern when it comes to our organic memory for information and experiences,” they said.
The experiments were conducted in a laboratory setting where participants were instructed to take screenshots and were not allowed to review them later. In everyday life, people often take screenshots specifically to review them later, such as saving a recipe or a map. “While this is likely the case for many of the photos and screenshots we take on a regular basis, if we capture experiences to create meaningful photo albums that get pulled out during family reunions, this is likely going to result in a net positive effect for autobiographical memory,” the researchers noted.
But for the thousands of screenshots that sit unreviewed in digital camera rolls, this research suggests they are likely forgotten by the organic memory system. “If some experience or information is really important to you, and you want to remember it without external aids, your best bet may be to put away your smartphone,” Fabrizio and Westerman advised. “Though digital calendars and reminders may be useful to ensure you make it to a doctor’s appointment, you’re probably better off leaving the photography to the professionals at the next wedding you attend.”
“We are planning to continue to investigate the photo-taking impairment effect in order to better understand when and why it occurs,” they said. “There are currently some contradictory findings in the literature in terms of the different factors that impact the presence and magnitude of the effect. This makes it difficult to reconcile all of the results in the field with any of the proposed accounts for the phenomenon.”
The study, “Digital amnesia: The aftermath of a screenshot,” was authored by Sophia P. Fabrizio, Rebecca Lurie, and Deanne L. Westerman.
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