- Title: Digital amnesia: The aftermath of a screenshot
- Authors: Sophia P. Fabrizio, Rebecca Lurie & Deanne L. Westerman
- Access the original paper here
- Watch a video overview:
Paper summary
Photography is one of the most common uses of a smartphone, and earlier work has shown that images we capture are remembered worse than images we simply look at. This study asked whether that cost buys us anything in return. Across seven experiments with 892 undergraduates, participants worked through sets of art images on their own phones, screenshotting some of them (in some experiments, all of them), then took memory tests. Screenshotting produced a large, consistent memory cost in every experiment. The predicted benefits did not appear: no better memory for where information came from, no improvement on a demanding maths task, and no boost to learning the material that came next. One modest benefit emerged, but only under narrow conditions and lenient scoring.
If teachers remember one thing from this study, it should be…
Capturing something on a screen is not the same as learning it. Students who screenshotted images remembered them far worse than students who simply looked, and the phone gave nothing back in return. If it matters, look at it properly first.
Paper Deep Dive
What are the key technical terms used in the paper?
- Digital capture effect: worse memory for images you photograph or screenshot than for ones you merely view.
- Cognitive offloading: relying on an external store, like a phone, instead of your own memory.
- Source memory: memory for how you encountered something.
- Incidental encoding: learning without knowing you’ll be tested.
What are the characteristics of the participants in the study?
892 undergraduates at a public university in the north-eastern United States took part across seven experiments. Where demographic data were collected, 69.9% identified as female, 28.7% as male and 1.4% as nonbinary. Ages ranged from 17 to 27 (mean 18.84). Each student joined only one experiment.
What does this paper add to the current field of research?
Memory costs from photographing have been documented since Henkel’s 2014 museum study. This paper is the first to test systematically whether screenshotting brings any compensating benefit, as offloading research would predict. Across seven experiments it finds almost none, pointing instead to a broader disengagement of attention.
What are the key implications for teachers in the classroom?
- A photo of the board is not a record of the lesson. This is the study’s sharpest message. Students captured images on their own phones, in a task that took a second and involved no fiddling with unfamiliar equipment, and still remembered them substantially worse than images they only looked at. Saying “you can just take a picture” quietly licenses students not to think about the thing in front of them. Where you would normally invite a photo, hand out the content instead and spend the reclaimed thirty seconds asking students to explain what’s on it.
- The cost is in the act of capturing, not the effort it takes. Teachers sometimes assume a quick snap is harmless because it barely interrupts anything. This study, and the earlier work it builds on, suggests otherwise: the impairment did not shrink when the capture was easy or the device familiar. Treat “it only takes a second” as a reason to be more suspicious of the habit, not less.
- Capturing only pays off if students go back to it. The authors are explicit that their findings apply to material that is captured and then never revisited, which describes most of what sits in a camera roll. If students do photograph something, make the return trip part of the instruction: “screenshot the task, then before you start, write it out in your own words.” A capture followed by rehearsal behaves like any other revision strategy. A capture on its own does not.
- Watch for the illusion of having got it. Participants screenshotted material while genuinely engaged in a task about art, and still lost the detail. The feeling that something is safely stored is not a reliable signal that it has been learned. A thirty-second retrieval check at the end of the lesson, with phones away, will tell you and your students far more than a folder of screenshots will.
- Offer a written alternative before you offer a photographic one. The impairment here extended to students’ memory for the context around the image, not just the image itself, which suggests capturing pulls attention away from the whole moment. When students need to take something away, defaulting to a short handwritten note rather than a screenshot keeps them processing the content rather than filing it.
Why might teachers exercise caution before applying these findings in their classroom?
The participants were US undergraduates working with art images in a lab, not pupils with lesson content. The captured images were never revisited, unlike revision notes. The one benefit found was small and depended on how recall was scored. The authors say older adults remain untested.
What is a single quote that summarises the key findings from the paper?
“Overall, these findings suggest that screenshotting imposes considerable memory costs without offering compensatory benefits.“
