Julia Soares

Who they are

Soares's paper is the most useful kind: it keeps the finding everybody quotes and takes away the reason everybody gives for it.

The first experiment put 42 undergraduates through a within-subjects design with paintings on a screen and three conditions, Observe, Camera and Snapchat. Snapchat was chosen because the platform does not retain the image, which turns a product decision into a manipulation of expected future access. Camera against Observe produced d = 0.70, with a confidence interval of 0.24 to 1.16, so the impairment replicated. Snapchat against Observe produced d = 1.21, interval 0.74 to 1.68. The impairment was larger when the photograph was not kept. Soares and Storm flag honestly that operating Snapchat may have consumed more of the fifteen-second viewing window, and that participants may not have fully believed the manipulation.

The second experiment addressed the timing concern directly, with 51 undergraduates and a sample size set by a power analysis on the first study. The conditions were Observe, Camera and Delete, and the viewing timer started only after the photograph had been taken, so the camera conditions received more total viewing time than the observe condition. The impairment appeared anyway: Camera at d = 0.58, Delete at d = 0.61, with no difference between the two. Their conclusion is that photo-taking "prospectively impairs how an experience is encoded even after the camera is put down", and that the results are inconsistent with the offloading hypothesis. They propose a metacognitive-illusion account instead, the idea that photographing produces a subjective sense of having encoded something, and say they cannot rule out an implicit or automatic form of offloading.

They then did something that happens less often than it should. Without being challenged, they reconciled their own result with the paper that had found the opposite, in print, in their General Discussion: when participants can decide for themselves what to photograph, photo-taking can enhance engagement and memory, so it is possible that photographing impairs memory by disrupting attentional engagement but only when the participant is not in control of what is photographed. They end with the sentence the field should have been using ever since: at this point we still know very little about exactly when and why photo-taking impairs memory.

Their paper also contains the single most reader-facing result in this whole literature. Asked afterwards what they thought had happened, 52 per cent of participants said taking photographs helps them remember, 26 per cent said it makes no difference, 3 per cent had no guess, and 19 per cent correctly said it impairs memory. Of those who said it helps, 62.5 per cent had just remembered less about the paintings they had photographed.

Her work is now half of a direct contradiction. Baike Li and colleagues also removed expected access to the photographs and found the impairment disappeared. Soares and Storm removed it and found the impairment survived at full size. Both studies are preregistered or power-planned, both sit in the same journal, and they point opposite ways on the same manipulation. That is a fact about a literature rather than a fault in either study.

Key papers

Soares is a working memory researcher whose output here is journal articles. This publication has verified no book of hers and lists the papers instead.

Soares, J. S., & Storm, B. C. (2018). "Forget in a Flash: A Further Investigation of the Photo-Taking-Impairment Effect." Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 7, 154-160. The Snapchat and Delete experiments, the timing control, the metacognition result, and the reconciliation with the volitional-photography finding.

Soares, J. S., & Storm, B. C. (2022). "Does taking multiple photos lead to a photo-taking-impairment effect?" Psychonomic Bulletin and Review. doi:10.3758/s13423-022-02149-2. Reported as finding the effect when participants take multiple photographs of an object. This publication holds it at record level only and has not read it.

Key ideas

The photo-impairment effect replicates, at d = 0.58 to 0.70 for ordinary photographing and d = 1.21 when the photograph is sent through a platform that does not keep it.

It is not explained by offloading. Removing the photograph did not remove the impairment, and deleting it changed nothing.

The impairment is prospective. It affects how the experience is encoded after the camera is put down, not only during the act.

People believe the opposite of what happens to them. A majority of participants thought photographing helps their memory, and most of those had just remembered less.

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