Scientists: the habit of taking screenshots is dangerous for health

The habit of taking screenshots on a smartphone impairs the memorization of what is depicted in them — and provides no benefit in return. Psychologists have termed this effect "digital amnesia": it operates unconsciously and automatically. The study was published in the journal Memory & Cognition.

A group of scientists from Binghamton University conducted a series of seven sequential experiments involving approximately 677 students. Some volunteers were asked to simply view images — such as works of art — while others were asked to take screenshots of them. Afterward, all participants were tested on what they managed to remember.

The results were telling: participants recognized viewed images in 78% of cases, while those saved as screenshots were recognized only 69.5% of the time. The failure in memory for details was even more striking: accuracy of recollections about the origin of an image was 71.3% for those simply viewed and only 53.5% for those screenshotted. Notably, screenshots impaired memory even more than regular photography.

Initially, the researchers hypothesized that a screenshot functions as a kind of memory "offloading": the brain delegates the task to the device, thereby freeing up resources for other tasks. However, this hypothesis was not confirmed — in subsequent tasks, those who took screenshots performed no better than the rest. In other words, a person loses memory of the saved material but gains absolutely nothing in return. The authors of the study recommend not relying on screenshots as a substitute for attention: if information is truly important to remember, it is better to examine it consciously.

Psychologists have documented the effect of digital amnesia before — for example, museum visitors remember paintings worse if they photograph them rather than study them closely. The mechanism, apparently, is related to the fact that the very act of saving shifts attention from content to action, and the brain essentially absolves itself of the responsibility for memorization, even though this provides no real "safety net."