Member-only story
This is a thing in the modern age. And something many of us have noticed at conferences or when giving talks, and likely also done (I have and do). A particularly insightful slide will generate a flurry of people pulling out their phones and snapping a picture.
Whether this will ever be looked at again is another question — but not only that, some research has shown that taking pictures seems to reduce memory. Presumably because it seems to offload the need to process the information.
This research has been done in real life scenarios such as visiting an art gallery but now researchers at the University of California looked specifically at presentation on computers — in itself a pretty good real-life scenario with more and more presentations being held online or virtually.
108 students were recruited by Annie Ditta et al. and given different instructions for taking photographs of slides. Either even numbered slides or odd numbered or as they saw fit or replicating other students. And what did they find?
Somewhat surprisingly they found that taking photographs of slides increased memory for these slides — somewhat surprising in my mind because firstly it was a lot of slides they took pictures of and, secondly, because most people had been assigned to groups that…
