Abstract
Photography has become a ubiquitous part of our day-to-day activities. More than ever before, people are choosing to pick up their cameras to capture moments that might otherwise be lost to time—an estimated 1.4 trillion photos were taken in the past year alone (InfoTrends, 2020). The advent of digital camera and smartphone technologies has also influenced the number of pictures we encounter on our social media feeds and in the news.
One of the primary functions that photos serve is that of a memory aid. Cameras let us capture events and objects for later reminiscing and our photos help cue our recollections of the past. In this thesis, we explore the relation between photography and memory in four ways: 1) by examining the way in which people take and view photos, and how this aligns with their function as a memory aid (Exploratory Survey); 2) by examining the effect of taking photos on memory for discrete objects (Study 1) and unfolding events (Study 2); 3) by examining the effect of taking photos on phenomenological characteristics of memory, such as ease of retrieval, vividness, coherence, and confidence (Study 2); and 4) by examining the extent to which overtly—that is, poorly—doctored photos might shape people’s memory for news events that did not happen (Study 3).
Taken together, the data reported in this thesis suggest that the effects of photo-taking on memory are small and depend on how people are taking photos and of what. Moreover, these effects vary as a function of the aspect of memory being assessed (i.e., recall, recognition, or phenomenological characteristics). In Study 1, we report a failed close replication of the seminal study on photo-taking and memory (Henkel, 2014) and three subsequent mini meta-analyses of photo-taking effects in the literature. In Study 2, we again found no evidence of photo-taking effects on recall, but we did observe—under some conditions—that photo-taking influenced participants’ phenomenological characteristics of their memories. In Study 3, we saw that participants easily rejected false news headlines shown with an overtly-doctored photo, but one week later they considered the events more likely to have happened than they had previously and indicated having some memory for them; these effects persisted even 10 weeks after debriefing. We conclude the thesis by providing some suggestions for minimising any negative impact of taking and viewing photos on memory in our daily lives.