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Capturing memories or making them fuzzier?

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Capturing memories or making them fuzzier?

Want to remember the experience of seeing the Mona Lisa at The Louvre, the massive dinosaur bones at the American Museum of Natural History or Dorothy鈥檚 ruby slippers at the Smithsonian?

Don鈥檛 bring your camera.

So says Dr. Linda Henkel, professor of psychology at Fairfield, whose research into photo-taking and memory was published in the Dec. 5, 2013 issue of Psychological Science , a prestigious journal of the Association for Psychological Science. News of her research has been reported in media outlets in the United States, Germany, Italy, England, Australia, and the Republic of China.

In research conducted with undergraduate students in the Bellarmine Museum of Art, Dr. Henkel found that museum-goers who took photos of works of art while walking around a museum had worse memory for the objects and for specific object details.

鈥淧eople so often whip out their cameras almost mindlessly to capture a moment, to the point that they are missing what is happening right in front of them,鈥 she said.

Dr. Henkel enlisted a team of psychology majors to conduct the study, which grew out of a conversation she had in the lab with Alyssa Accomando 鈥12, of Beverly, Mass. Accomando, Chelsea Morales 鈥13, of Enfield, Conn., and Andrea Teofilo 鈥12, of Woodbridge, Conn., helped with the study.

Katelyn Parisi 鈥14, of Clifton, N.J., developed a follow-up study for independent research looking at the effects on memory if the individual is in the photo in question. She got the idea from her memories of canyon jumping in Switzerland. She realized her memories were from a third-party perspective and wondered if it was because she had seen photos of herself from that event.

鈥淔rom there, the idea just took off and soon enough developed into my independent research study,鈥 she said. 鈥淭he findings thus far show that when people look at photos that they are in, it changes the perspective from which they remember the event.

鈥淏eing able to conduct research as an undergraduate has been an incredibly enriching experience. The fact that I had the opportunity to take a random idea, something I was simply curious about, and turn it into my own research study still amazes me every day.鈥

Dr. Henkel was thrilled she and her students could move out of the lab and into a real-world situation right on campus. 鈥淭his was an amazing opportunity to extend my laboratory research into the more complex world of everyday life, using stimuli far richer and engaging than would otherwise be possible in the confines of my lab,鈥 she said. 鈥淯ltimately students got to see that psychological science is all around us, and the world literally is our lab!鈥

She thanked Dr. Jill Deupi, director and chief curator for University Museums, and Carey Weber, registrar and collections manager for the Bellarmine, for arranging for research in the museum galleries.

To read the original report in Psychological Science , click here.

Last modified: 12-10-13 08:55 AM

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