Forget in a Flash: A Further Investigation of the Photo-Taking-Impairment Effect | Hacker News Reader

Forget in a Flash: A Further Investigation of the Photo-Taking-Impairment Effect

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I am shocked by this as I find myself mostly able to remember the moments when I took a photo... like, I went to a wedding last week, and I have a really strong memory of most of the photos I took even though I have not yet looked at any of them. I would have assumed the process of paying careful attention to a scene with the goal of capturing "the perfect moment" makes that moment itself special and unique, not just from your analysis and critique but also simply from how it forces that moment to be separate from the continuous stream of time over which your interest would previously had have to have been spread.

> the process of paying careful attention to a scene

I think you've hit on the main thing here that (in a sense) differentiates you from the "normal photographer". Honestly, a lot of people just "point and shoot", in the article's "save an ephemeral memory" sense. You're taking the time to make a careful composition (and artistic composition is not something most people study). Your "capturing 'the perfect moment'" and "analysis and critique" are just not something a lot of friends and family do on vacations.

Not that there's anything wrong with any of that! But I think that's probably the difference here.

Agreed. Personally, I take photos daily - but a big portion of them is to capture something I don't have time to write down or a capacity to remember. Those could be adds in newspapers, clothing in some store etc.

When I first read about this effect years ago, it was accompanied with the advice that careful study of the scene which you are photographing is enough to offset the effect (and perhaps even amplify memories).

I suspect that in "casual" photography, the photographer is simply focused on getting the camera turned on, pointing it in the right direction, and remembering to press the shutter, rather than the scene itself, and hence form no memories of the scene.

Another anecdote in favor of this idea: most of my "visual" memories from my last 2 vacations were scenes and moments that I either photographed, or wanted to photograph but didn't for some reason or other.

I have a somewhat similar experience, except that I’ve concluded that it’s far easier for me to remember a 2d image than physical 3d representation. My hypothesis is that a flat 2d image is just far less information, and doesn’t vary based on the angle I look at it, so it focuses attention. It’s also something I can reinforce by looking at again, even in thumbnail form. I’m not great at remembering faces, but remembering pictures of faces is super easy. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I’ve concluded it’s not (very) related to the extra attention required when taking a photo is that I can often remember photos of people that I didn’t take - e.g. their facebook profile photos.

Were these posed photographs? I find this effect happens on candid photographs or action shots, both of which I consider much more valuable than posed photographs.

No: I don't really enjoy posed photographs and don't bother taking them.

I bet that it would change if you actually looked at each of them right after taking.

On the other hand, photos reviewed 2-3 times (especially after few months/years) become much more durable memories than those simply observed directly. I tend to only remember things I have photographed in the last 20 years, that is why I take photos of things I want to make sure I will remember. A photo can revive a whole lot of extra memories associated to the moment.

I think the best approach is to only take a few photos of an event. Just enough to be memory triggers.

Increasingly, we see people spending more time worried about photos than just enjoying the thing they are photographing.

For events that do need more "documenting", then you should have a designated photographer (professional or not) that way the rest of the attendees can just enjoy it.

Do whatever you enjoy. If you like taking photos and want to spend your time doing it good for you.

https://xkcd.com/1314/

> On the other hand, photos reviewed 2-3 times (.. become much more durable memories.

Alright, but your sentence is written as a fact, but the rest of what you wrote makes it sound like personal experience.

Hm, this reminded me of the "A placebo can work even when you know it’s a placebo" case: https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/placebo-can-work-even-kn...

We take a pill that we know will do nothing, and our body reacts anyway

We take a picture that we know will do nothing, and our body reacts anyway

What I see here is that our ""logic"" gives no feedback to the ""subconscious"" mechanisms that get formed, such as : "I take a pill, I get better", "I take a picture, I will see this again"

What's most interesting to me is that the conclusion seems to be that their hypothesis wasn't quite right, and that offloading isn't quite what's happening here:

    These results suggest that offloading may not be 
    the sole, or even primary, mechanism for the photo-
    taking-impairment effect.

I'm taking the time to comment on this because other comments seem to ignore this interesting turn of event.

At a more meta-level, they basically failed to replicate their own paper (they disproved the main hypothesis).

Which shows exactly what the big problem is: you just throw some ideas out, do some statistical analysis, and presto, you are "a scientist discovered a new thing"

This is a big success. We need more scientists willing to publish dead ends and ideas that turn out to be wrong. At the very least it hints at future areas of research. A lot of great science involves testing common sense and finding it's wrong.

They could have hacked their way to a positive result, good on them for not.

As a molecular biologist whose been in the field for nearly a quarter of a century (ouch, I'm old), I can't tell you how important your comment is. Too many times I've been to conferences where a small group of researchers is informally discussing a common roadblock in a procedure or technique and one in the group says, "We found out months ago that you can't use compound Y because it inhibits X downstream". For the love of all that is good, why didn't you publish that?! You could have saved countless combined hours and materials for other labs and increased the rate of progress. We all know the answer: Reviewers and editors want to publish flashy new discoveries, not fizzled experiments. Online discussions and open access has helped the issue, but the underlying pressure on scientists to publish only positive findings and leave out the critical trial-and-error data must end as it is is essentially fudging research and does a disservice to other researchers and science as a whole, intended or not. Whew, that was cathartic. I'll fade back into the shadows now.

I'd like to take the effort to thank you for staying true to the pursuit of real science and trying to demand that others meet the standards. A well-tested negative result is not a failed experiment, it is one less option to pursue.

As I've been known to tell junior engineers that ask how to become expert in some field, "the easiest way is to fail in every possible way without repeating yourself. Whatever is left is correct. Note that I didn't say that's the fastest way." Gaining new knowledge is always a combination of discovering both dead ends and possible successful paths.

I completely agree, it was a really big relief when I read the last 3 sentences of the abstract. I was expecting the typical "sensationalist" ending where surprise, surprise the original hypothesis of the researchers turned out to be true, unbelievable.

This might be similar to the "write it down so you can stop thinking about it" effect. I often have an idea, e.g. for a blog post, that I just can't seem to get rid of. My mind just keeps turning it over and over. Then I write a draft, and poof I stop thinking about it. The fact that I usually don't finish turning the draft into a real post is a separate problem. ;)

There really is something about "offloading" those thoughts into some external place, and I really don't see why the authors even think it's relevant if it's subsequently deleted. The damage has already been done, the thing already partly forgotten, the instant the picture is taken. Did it ever seem likely that we'd have to check back multiple times to see whether a memory was stored elsewhere before forgetting it? Certainly when I've forgotten stuff that's never how it has been. Once is enough.

That's one of the key things I learned when I read the Getting Things Done book. If I'm stressing out about the number of different tasks I need to get done, capturing them (whether writing them down, putting them in Trello, etc.) helps me to not dwell on them, allowing me to more easily focus on a single task.

I wonder if you'd get different results with analog photography.

I'm really into film photography and I find I remember the motives I'm shooting quite well. Maybe that's because with film you're more deliberate in what you shoot and due to the sense of anticipation to seeing the final result.

The study tested people who would lose access to the photos immediately or delete them intentionally, and they still succumbed to the effect... so I'd expect it would be similar for analog.

I think the the more important distinction you mentioned is that photographers who are a bit beyond amateur are more likely to analyze what they're shooting, and therefore remember it.

They have still seen them after taking, which is what might actually be a trigger for the discussed offloading effect.

How about seeing the photo itself? I'd be interested in testing situations where you take a photo but don't see it even once, not even the preview after taking it (for instance, using an analog camera). As I understand it, both situations tested here forced you to see the taken photo, which may actually be the trigger for the effect, not the photo taking action itself.

This study is confounded and made unnecessarily complicated by using Snapchat. The experimental design should have been to instruct participants that during two (of the three) sessions they will be required to take a photo of each painting using the native camera app; and photos from one of the sessions will be available for reference during the test.

I think there’s a lot of information we take in about our surroundings (sounds, smell, peripheral vision, motion, etc) that all gets shoved in to a ‘memory’. When we are focused on taking pictures, we block that stuff out - either physically (peripheral vision) or mentally (sound, smells).

Obviously if I'm operating recording equipment I'm less receptive to my surroundings. That's all they found. I don't see how this should be called "offloading". I'd call it "overloading".

Does Google Glass continuously wipe your memory?

I had this problem with digital photography and was scared SHITLESS. Glad this is a known effect.

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