Photo-Taking Impairment in Recognition Memory: Comparing Attentional Disengagement and Cognitive Offloading Accounts
[ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT RETRIEVED AND SEARCHED AT SOURCE, the open-access repository copy. The abstract, the three experiments' condition means and the discussion of Soares and Storm were read; THE FULL GENERAL DISCUSSION WAS NOT READ, so nothing here describes what that section argues] Li, B., Gilbert, S. J., Yu, Y., Ju, Y., Tang, B., Yang, C., & Liu, M. (in press). 'Photo-Taking Impairment in Recognition Memory: Comparing Attentional Disengagement and Cognitive Offloading Accounts.' Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition. doi:10.1037/mac0000287. The repository copy gives the publication year as 2026. Data at osf.io/hg73f. FIRST AUTHOR IS BAIKE LI, Liaoning Normal University, NOT Gilbert, who is second author and at the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and is the better-known name in this literature. CREDIT LI. Meng Liu is corresponding author. Funded by the Natural Science Foundation of China, grants 32400872 and 32400873, and of Liaoning Province. No conflicts declared. Three experiments on a Liaoning Normal University participant pool, roughly 60 to 68 participants each, with preregistered sequential-Bayes-factor stopping rules and a preregistered minimum of 30 per group in Experiment 2. EXPERIMENT 1 replicated the impairment: photographed items recognised less accurately than observed ones, with recognition in the observe condition at M = 0.841, SD = 0.121. EXPERIMENT 2 tested attentional disengagement by comparing a full smartphone photograph against a single Bluetooth button press, 62 participants, 31 per group: the impairment persisted despite the lower operational demands of Bluetooth photography, which challenges the attentional disengagement hypothesis. The more effortful task did produce a somewhat larger effect, d = 0.26, 95 per cent CI 0.05 to 0.47, which they themselves call relatively modest. EXPERIMENT 3 manipulated expected access, 68 participants, 34 per group, a 2 by 2 mixed design: the impairment appeared in the accessible group, F(1, 66) = 7.668, p = .006, and, crucially, the impairment was eliminated in the inaccessible group. Their abstract concludes that the effect depends on beliefs about future access to stored information rather than arising solely from attentional demands during the act. THEY CITE AND ENGAGE SOARES AND STORM DIRECTLY. SO THE MECHANISM LITERATURE IS NOW DIRECTLY CONTRADICTORY: both studies removed future access, one found the impairment survived at full size and the other found it disappeared, both are preregistered or power-planned, and both are in the same journal. Print both and pick no side.
[ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT RETRIEVED AND SEARCHED AT SOURCE, the open-access repository copy. The abstract, the three experiments' condition means and the discussion of Soares and Storm were read; THE FULL GENERAL DISCUSSION WAS NOT READ, so nothing here describes what that section argues] Li, B., Gilbert, S. J., Yu, Y., Ju, Y., Tang, B., Yang, C., & Liu, M. (in press). 'Photo-Taking Impairment in Recognition Memory: Comparing Attentional Disengagement and Cognitive Offloading Accounts.' Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition. doi:10.1037/mac0000287. The repository copy gives the publication year as 2026. Data at osf.io/hg73f. FIRST AUTHOR IS BAIKE LI, Liaoning Normal University, NOT Gilbert, who is second author and at the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and is the better-known name in this literature. CREDIT LI. Meng Liu is corresponding author. Funded by the Natural Science Foundation of China, grants 32400872 and 32400873, and of Liaoning Province. No conflicts declared. Three experiments on a Liaoning Normal University participant pool, roughly 60 to 68 participants each, with preregistered sequential-Bayes-factor stopping rules and a preregistered minimum of 30 per group in Experiment 2. EXPERIMENT 1 replicated the impairment: photographed items recognised less accurately than observed ones, with recognition in the observe condition at M = 0.841, SD = 0.121. EXPERIMENT 2 tested attentional disengagement by comparing a full smartphone photograph against a single Bluetooth button press, 62 participants, 31 per group: the impairment persisted despite the lower operational demands of Bluetooth photography, which challenges the attentional disengagement hypothesis. The more effortful task did produce a somewhat larger effect, d = 0.26, 95 per cent CI 0.05 to 0.47, which they themselves call relatively modest. EXPERIMENT 3 manipulated expected access, 68 participants, 34 per group, a 2 by 2 mixed design: the impairment appeared in the accessible group, F(1, 66) = 7.668, p = .006, and, crucially, the impairment was eliminated in the inaccessible group. Their abstract concludes that the effect depends on beliefs about future access to stored information rather than arising solely from attentional demands during the act. THEY CITE AND ENGAGE SOARES AND STORM DIRECTLY. SO THE MECHANISM LITERATURE IS NOW DIRECTLY CONTRADICTORY: both studies removed future access, one found the impairment survived at full size and the other found it disappeared, both are preregistered or power-planned, and both are in the same journal. Print both and pick no side.
Written from the aCCEPTED MANUSCRIPT RETRIEVED AND SEARCHED AT SOURCE, the open-access repository copy. The abstract, the three experiments' condition means and the discussion of Soares and Storm were read; THE FULL GENERAL DISCUSSION WAS NOT READ, so nothing here describes what that section argues.
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Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition. doi:10.1037/mac0000287