• Posted August 19, 2026

Photos, Screenshots Degrade People's Memory, Study Says

Think twice before taking that selfie or saving that screenshot to remember something, researchers warn.

It might help you in the moment, but could harm your memory in the long run, a new study says.

Taking photos or screenshots during an experience has been linked to worse memories of the specific information or event, researchers reported recently in the journal Memory & Cognition.

“Unless you are actively reviewing those images as cues for elaborative memory retrieval, it is unlikely to benefit you,” lead researcher Sophia Fabrizio said in a news release. She is a doctoral candidate in psychology at Binghamton University in upstate New York. 

This “photo-taking impairment effect” occurs when a picture taker doesn’t review the snaps they’ve taken, researchers said.

People can boost their long-term retention by using pics to retrieve and review memories, researchers said.

However, most folks take about 20 photos a day. With around 2,000 stored on the average smartphone, that's far too many that could be used to improve memory, researchers said.

To see how taking photos and memory are connected, researchers conducted seven experiments.

Some participants captured images of artwork and then were tested on their memory. Others solved math problems to test how their brain power worked alongside captured images.

None of the experiments showed clear memory benefits from taking screenshots, researchers concluded.

“Taken together, the results of the current study suggest that we are likely harming our memory for information and experiences with the press of a button, and that this impairment may even extend beyond what is captured,” Fabrizio said.

This “digital amnesia” might be explained by divided attention, researchers said. The act of capturing an experience takes away brain resources that would otherwise be dedicated to storing it away in memory.

However, this is unlikely to completely explain the phenomenon, because people show a comparable memory deficit even when extra time is provided to view art before or after taking a photograph, researchers noted.

Another possibility is cognitive offloading, which is the automatic inclination to allocate less brainpower to remember information being stored externally, such as in a pic or screenshot, researchers said.

A third hypothesis is attentional disengagement, in which the act of taking a photo or screenshot causes folks to unconsciously distance themselves from the experience, researchers said.

“This extends beyond captured information to the broader context of an event,” Fabrizio explained.

“The poorer ‘source’ memory for whether the art pieces were screenshotted or viewed — and in the original museum study on this effect, worse memory for the location of photographed art pieces in the exhibit — provides some preliminary support for this account,” she said.

People who want to keep their memory sharp should instead break out a pen and paper, researchers suggested.

Jotting down notes forces folks to process and organize information into manageable bullet points and draw connections, in a process referred to as “desirable difficulty,” researchers said.

However, writing something down can also contribute to the same sort of cognitive offloading that occurs using images, researchers noted. That’s why a person forgets a friend’s birthday after adding it to their calendar or a phone number once it is tucked away into a contact list.

Regularly reviewing screenshots and photos you took may also help with memory retention, researchers said. 

More information

The Mayo Clinic has tips to improve memory.

SOURCE: Binghamton University, news release, Aug. 17, 2026