Taking Photos Improves Certain Kinds of Memories and Weakens Others

Big Think:

I lived in East Asia from 2009 to 2011. At that time, I visited five countries: China, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, and Thailand. As you can imagine, I took a ton of photos, the best of which were loaded to my social media pages, so that my friends and family could be a part of it, and see what I was seeing. But I always wondered if all those shots added to my enjoyment and deepened my memories, or by being preoccupied taking them, degraded my appreciation and recollection. A recent study out of The Wharton School of business has the answer.

Professor Alix Barasch went through a similar line of questioning. “I did a Fulbright in Hong Kong and Macau,” she said during a recent phone interview. She wondered how picture taking influenced her experience and memories of it, and decided to investigate. Now an assistant professor of marketing at NYU’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business, she co-authored this study as part of her thesis at the University of Pennsylvania. Prof. Barasch told me she came into her PhD. through photos. As a consumer psychology expert, it’s a topic she’s been studying for the past five or six years.

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