Researchers gave people a simple choice while looking at art: just look at it, or take a picture to save for later. Only one version of that choice left a real memory behind.
Scientists Tested Four Ways People Try to Save a Memory. The One Nearly Everyone Reaches for First Erased It the Fastest.
In a 2025 study in Memory & Cognition, Rebecca Lurie, Sophia Fabrizio, and Deanne Westerman at Binghamton University ran four experiments and found that saving something with a photo made people remember it worse, and saving it with a screenshot, the fastest, easiest option of all, hurt memory the most.
Across four experiments, people looked at artwork on a computer, a provided tablet, or their own phone. Some were told to just look. Others were told to take a photo. In two of the experiments, others were told to take a screenshot instead. Later, everyone was tested on how well they actually remembered what they had seen.
**The pattern held up again and again: people who only looked remembered the most.** In the first experiment, people who simply viewed the art scored about 78 percent on a later recognition test. People who photographed it, whether on a lab tablet or their own familiar phone, scored around 63 to 65 percent, a real drop, and the device in their hand made no difference. **The camera did not help them remember. It replaced the remembering.**
Then the researchers compared photos directly against screenshots, the option that takes the least effort of all. **Screenshotting hurt memory even more than photographing did**, and a third experiment confirmed it was not simply because a screenshot felt like an unfamiliar action: even on their own phones, in a screenshot they knew how to take, people remembered less.
1. The easier it was to save, the more it cost them
In the second experiment, people who took a photo of the artwork remembered about 63 percent of it. **People who took a screenshot of the exact same image remembered about 54 percent, a significantly bigger drop.** A screenshot takes one tap. It requires no framing, no aiming, no thought about composition. It is, by a wide margin, the easiest way to 'save' something on a phone.
A third experiment ruled out the obvious objection, that people just were not used to screenshotting and it threw them off. Even using their own familiar phones, **people who screenshotted an image still remembered it worse than people who simply looked at it**, about 54 percent versus 69 percent. The unfamiliarity was not the story. The ease was.
The fastest way to save something on a phone was the fastest way to stop remembering it.
2. It was not the phone's fault. It was the plan.
The fourth experiment, the largest of the four at 306 people, asked something different: **why** were people saving what they saved? When people explained their reason for taking a screenshot, 'so I would not have to remember it' came up about 31 percent of the time. For photos, the same reason came up only about 19 percent of the time.
**People were not just failing to remember. A meaningful number of them were screenshotting specifically so they would not have to.** Psychologists call this cognitive offloading: the more confident you are that a device will hold onto something for you, the less effort your own mind spends encoding it. Writing about this same research, one psychologist summarized the trade plainly: creating an external record means you expend less effort creating an internal one. The phone remembers. You quietly stop trying to.
People weren't only forgetting. A third of the time, they were choosing to let the phone do it instead.
3. What four experiments with paintings can't prove, and what they point toward
This was artwork on a wall, tested a short while later, not a lifetime of family stories, and the researchers were careful to study exactly what they measured, nothing more. A screenshot is not the same thing as never having a photo of your grandmother again.
But it lands in the middle of a much larger, well established finding in memory research: **actively producing something, saying it, explaining it, telling it out loud, builds a stronger memory than passively receiving or filing it away ever does.** A screenshot is about as passive as memory gets: one tap, and the mind moves on, trusting the phone to hold what it just chose not to. **Telling a story out loud is the opposite motion.** It is not a file. It is work the mind has to do, and that work is exactly what makes it stick, for the person telling it and for whoever is listening.
A phone can hold a picture forever. It can't do the remembering for you. Saying it out loud does that instead.
I have hundreds of screenshots of my dad's old texts about his fishing stories, thinking I'd go back and read them someday. I never once did. The story I actually remember, word for word, all the way through, is the one I got him to tell Ari out loud instead of typing it to me. I didn't have to save anything. I just had to listen.Priya, 39, recording her father's stories on Ari
What you get with LifeScribe
- A 2025 study in Memory & Cognition ran four experiments on how photographing and screenshotting affect memory.
- People who only looked at something remembered about 77 percent of it later. People who screenshotted the same thing remembered about 54 percent.
- In the largest experiment, 306 people, screenshotting was the option people most often chose specifically so they would not have to remember it themselves.
- Built on documented research: Lurie, Fabrizio, and Westerman, Memory & Cognition, 2025, volume 53, pages 2301 to 2311.
Start free, with nothing to lose
Call the person whose stories you don't want to lose. Free. Ari listens and asks the questions, so the memory gets made the way this research says memory actually gets made: by telling it, not by saving it.
**A memory saved with one tap is a memory the mind quietly stops working on.** That is what four experiments found, again and again, with paintings on a wall. It says nothing kind about the years of family stories saved the exact same way: a photo, a screenshot, a text thread nobody ever rereads. The story is still there. It just needs to be told, not filed away.
Don't screenshot their story. Hear it.
Ari calls and lets them tell it out loud, the way memory actually holds on to something.
Questions grandparents ask us
What did the study actually find?
A 2025 study in Memory & Cognition, by Rebecca Lurie, Sophia Fabrizio, and Deanne Westerman at Binghamton University, ran four experiments and found that people who photographed or screenshotted an image remembered it worse than people who simply looked at it, with screenshotting, the easiest option, producing the biggest memory loss of all.
How large was the study?
Four separate experiments with 38, 39, 28, and 306 participants respectively (after excluding a small number in two of the experiments), using art images shown on computers, a provided tablet, or people's own phones.
Why did screenshots hurt memory more than photos?
The largest experiment asked people why they saved what they saved. People said they screenshotted specifically so they would not have to remember it about 31 percent of the time, versus about 19 percent for photos. Researchers call this cognitive offloading: trusting a device to hold onto something means your own mind spends less effort encoding it.
Does this mean taking photos of family moments is bad?
No. The finding is about what happens when a photo or screenshot replaces the effort of remembering, not that photos themselves are harmful. A photo can be a wonderful keepsake. It just is not, on its own, the same thing as a memory, and this research helps explain why the two can feel so different years later.
What's the practical takeaway for preserving family stories?
If remembering matters, the telling matters more than the saving. Getting someone to say a story out loud, and getting others to actually listen to it, does the work that a screenshot or a photo was never built to do.
https://getlifescribeapp.com/blog/the-cost-of-saving-a-memory