Digital devices and memory

Introduction: Researchers studied whether taking photos of objects affects how well people remember them.

Participants: Ninety undergraduate students (61 women and 29 men, aged 18 to 23) at a university in the northeastern United States took part for course credit. Race/ethnicity was not reported.

Method: Participants took a guided tour of a university art museum. At each of 20 objects, the guide told them either to photograph the object with a smartphone or simply to look at it carefully. Each participant photographed 10 objects and looked at the other 10; which objects were photographed was randomly decided for each participant. Participants spent the same amount of time, 30 seconds, at every object. The next day, without seeing their photos, they wrote down the names of as many objects as they could remember and answered questions about details of each object (for example, 'What was the statue holding in its left hand?').

Results and Discussion: Participants recalled the names of fewer photographed objects than looked-at objects (a mean of 4.1 versus 5.6 out of 10) and answered fewer detail questions correctly about photographed objects (54% versus 68%). Both differences were statistically significant. Many participants said they 'didn't need to remember' the objects they had photographed.

Introduction: Researchers compared taking lecture notes on a laptop with taking notes by hand.

Participants: 120 eleventh-grade students (63 girls and 57 boys) from three high schools in California took part with parental consent. Parents reported their race/ethnicity as 41% Hispanic or Latino, 30% White, 18% Asian, 7% Black and 4% multiracial.

Method: Students were randomly assigned to take notes on a laptop or by hand while watching a 20-minute recorded lecture about the history of vaccines. Researchers counted how much of each student's notes copied the lecture word for word. One week later, students reviewed their own notes for 10 minutes and then took a test with factual questions (such as the year an event happened) and conceptual questions that required explaining or applying ideas from the lecture.

Results and Discussion: Laptop notes were longer (mean of 310 words versus 190 words) and contained more word-for-word copying (14% versus 6% of words). On factual questions, the two groups scored about the same (laptop 70% correct, handwritten 69%). On conceptual questions, students who took notes by hand scored higher (62% versus 51%), a statistically significant difference.

Introduction: Researchers tested whether a quiz app helps students remember what they read better than rereading on a screen.

Participants: 84 college students (50 women and 34 men) enrolled in an introductory biology course at a community college in Texas. Race/ethnicity was not reported.

Method: Each student studied two textbook passages of equal difficulty on a tablet, spending 20 minutes on each. For one passage (randomly chosen), the student read it and then reread it on the screen. For the other, the student read it and then used an app that asked short-answer questions about it and showed the correct answer after each attempt. Three days later, students took a test with new questions about both passages.

Results and Discussion: Students answered 71% of questions correctly about the passages they had studied with the quiz app, compared with 52% about the passages they had reread. Right after studying, however, 68% of students predicted they would remember the reread passage better.