Shafaqna English- Taking a screenshot may actually make people less likely to remember what they saw, according to new research suggesting that the simple act of “saving” an image can disrupt attention without providing any meaningful cognitive benefit, according to PsyPost.
Published in Memory & Cognition, the study involved seven experiments with hundreds of university students. Across the experiments, participants consistently remembered images they had simply viewed better than images they had screenshotted.
In one experiment, recognition fell from 78% for viewed images to 69.5% for screenshotted images. Participants also struggled to remember whether they had viewed or captured an image, correctly identifying the source only 53.5% of the time for screenshots versus 71.3% for viewed images.
Researchers initially wondered whether screenshots might function as cognitive offloading—allowing the brain to rely on the phone as external storage and freeing mental resources for other tasks. But the experiments found little evidence for this. Screenshotting did not improve performance on difficult math problems or substantially improve memory for subsequent information.
The findings suggest that the memory impairment may occur automatically rather than through a conscious decision to rely on the saved image. Simply categorizing an experience as “captured” may reduce the attention devoted to encoding it into memory.
Researchers caution that the experiments were conducted in controlled laboratory settings with mostly young adults and relatively neutral images. In everyday life, screenshots can also serve a useful purpose when people actually review them later.
Still, the message is striking: if something is important and you want to remember it yourself, saving it to your phone may not be enough—and putting the phone away could help.
Source: PsyPost