Digital photography: message and memory

Article from 01 April 2014 by Antony Funnell, a reporter with Australia's RN (Radio National), looking at the practice and effects of mass digital photography.  Among the more interesting themes he notes are:

1.  The degree to which we now expect to be able to control images of ourselves when shot by others.  I haven't yet run into this, but I don't shoot a lot of photos of people, nor am I often the subject of photographers.

2.  Memory orphans, images that are captured but never reviewed, simply stored.  Here the act of capture has become more important than product.

3.  An advertising campaign in which a father saved his daughter's lives, not by rescuing them from harm, by by photographing them.

4.  He cites results from experiments on memory and camera use by Linda Henkel, a psychology professor at Fairfield University in Connecticut, showing that 1) attending to objects without a camera produces a stronger memory, and 2) photographing specific features of an object also produces stronger memory.  What seems common here is attending and intention.  I know from my own experience that I attend to surroundings more intensely if I'm photographing than just walking around, but within a rather narrow range of experience.  When I'm without a camera my mind is likely to be engaged with additional, non-visual stimuli and to that degree my experience of place or event when photographing may be narrower.  I may be less likely to recall sound, for example, than sight.

In 2013 Henkel conducted a controlled experiment in which she asked a group of undergraduate students to take a guided tour of a local museum. During the tour, the participants were instructed to observe a certain number of objects, and then later to both observe and photograph others. A day after the event, each student’s recall was put to the test. 

What Henkel and her colleagues discovered was that participants were less likely to recall the details of the objects they photographed and more likely to remember the specifics of those objects they had simply observed. In short, the use of a camera actually decreased a person’s ability to remember what they’d seen. Henkel refers to this as the ‘photo-taking impairment’ effect. 

‘It's the notion that when you take pictures of things, you are counting on the camera to remember for you. And because of that, you don't really engage in the additional processing that would help you consolidate that experience into a more detailed memory,’ she says. 

... 

Professor Henkel later followed up her original study with an experiment in which she not only asked participants to photograph various objects, but to make particular photographic note of certain features; to zoom-in on the feet of a statue, for instance. 

According to Henkel, the action of deliberately zooming-in dramatically improved a student’s recall both of the specific area of focus in question and the overall object itself. And their recall for each was higher than it was for students who simply observed objects without photographing them.

A commenter to the article raises an interesting question:  does reviewing a recorded experience erase or otherwise change memory?  Surely it must.

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