I live very close to Port Meadow, one of the largest meadows of open common land in the UK, already in existence in the 10th century, and mentioned in the Domesday book in 1086. I saw my first-ever live, wild oriole there. The land has been never ploughed, so it is possible to discern outlines of older archaeological remains, some going back to the Bronze Age. The consistent management of the land makes the changes predictable: it turns into a lake in winter, is sprinkled with buttercups this time of year (see pictures below the fold – both are taken at about the same place, but one in May and the other in November), and looks mysterious and misty in the fall. Whenever I walk on Port Meadow I take my camera, anxious to preserve any beautiful view that falls on my retina, to preserve it for future memories. And, like many other parents, I take dozens of pictures of my growing children. Recently, I saw an NPR piece (no author given) that took issue with this tendency to want to preserve pictures for future memory.
The article launches a two-pronged attack against pictures. First, by worrying about capturing the moment, we lose the transience and beauty of the moment and enjoy it less. Second, the article cites psychological evidence that shows that people actually remember fewer objects during a museum visit if they were allowed to take photos of them, compared to when they only were allowed to observe them. The phenomenon is known as the photo-taking-impairment effect. Linda Henkel, who discovered the effect, says: "Any time…we count on these external memory devices, we're taking away from the kind of mental cognitive processing that might help us actually remember that stuff on our own."
There is something to be said for the first objection. The transient and fleeting moment has an aesthetic quality – suppose on is, for instance, privy to a brilliant jazz improvisation or a double rainbow, these experiences in themselves can have more value because of their ephemerality.
I'm less convinced by the second objection, though. From the perspective of extended cognition, it makes sense that if we outsource our memories to pictures, we generate fewer long-term internal, episodic memories of the event we depict. The phenomenon is pervasive, think of the Google effect, which shows that people who are told in advance they can look up information remember less of it. However, is it the case that there is an inherent superiority of internal memories compared to pictures? The NPR article suggests it is, and that the main value of photos is that they can serve as aides-memoirs for our internal memories. According to Henkel, photos are "still valuable tools that can provide "rich retrieval clues" later on".
This view privileges the internal, unsullied, mental representation, and regards external representations as somehow less valuable. A clear example of it in the literature is Elizabeth Loftus' work on the distorting effects of social interaction on eyewitness testimony. As Sutton and colleagues write "the unsullied individual memory appears as the gold standard, and social influence as a primarily negative intrusion: clever experiments create conditions in which subjects yield to another person’s version of the past."
Moreover, it also assumes that, absent cameras, storing and retrieving long-term memories is an individualized, internal process. But this is not the case. For instance, John Sutton and colleagues found that couples who have been together for a long time construct episodic memories together and that it was possible for one partner to have episodic memories she never experienced, based on her husband's testimony. Extensive reliance on testimony even enhances, rather than decreases, memory.
A paper in Child Development by Elaine Reese and colleagues found that Maori children have their first episodic (personal, autobiographic) memories at about 2.5 years – i.e., they can remember things that happened to them as young as 2.5 years. By contrast, people of European descent in New Zealand on average have their first autobiographical memories on average at 3.5 years. What explains the one-year difference? Reese et al found that Maori mothers are much more detailed in their accounts of the past "Remember, when you were a baby…" when they talk to their children. This may help "create" memories, which, undoubtedly, for an internalist would be fake memories as they are based on testimony rather than a child's internal recording of the events. However, they are only fake memories if one exclusively favors an internalist view of memories. If one is more liberal in ascribing memories, as in Clark & Chalmers's famous analogy between Otto, the Alzheimer patient who relies on his notebook, and Inga, the neurotypical person who relies on her memory to recall the same event, it is not clear whether early Maori testimony-induced memories would be less real than those stored by their own experience. Indeed, such memories may be more real in a sense, since presumably mothers have a better recall of what went on than the child at that age.
Taking photos by themselves of course does nothing to enhance our external memories. The NPR article is correct in pointing out that we too often take pictures that just sit on our computers or memory cards. But by looking together at pictures, a reconstructive and collaborative process can take place. My sister and I would often look together at old pictures of travels and birthday parties, supplementing these with rich details. Today, we look back in our oldest child's baby photo albums to see how she compares to our youngest in his habits and development. This reveals striking differences, for instance, a picture shows our oldest clapping her hands at 9 months, whereas our youngest only did so at 11 months. Since they are nearly 10 years apart, we would never have been able to remember this without pictures.
There is one possible downside on taking pictures that I would grant, if it is indeed the case that taking pictures negatively impacts all memories (not just visual memories). Tulving wrote about the phenomenology of autobiographical memories as a form of mental time travel, a multi-sensory travel back in the past. It is true that pictures only capture the visible modality – I can, unfortunately, not capture the smells of Port Meadow, and even the soundscape of bird cries, the rustling of leaves and the boats and rippling water of the river Isis cannot be adequately captured.
New APPS 
Leave a reply to André de Avillez Cancel reply