Capturing moments, losing memories: A social photo-taking impairment effect.

Taking photos is a ubiquitous everyday activity, woven into social life from classrooms and meetings to travel and social gatherings. Photography is known to impair memory for photographed experiences, a phenomenon termed the photo-taking impairment effect (PTIE), but prior work has focused solely on the photographer. The present research introduces and tests a social extension of this phenomenon: One person's photo-taking activity can impair a nearby companion's memory for the same event, which we term the companion-PTIE. Across four experiments spanning controlled laboratory tasks and a simulated art exhibition, we show that photo-taking reduces a nonphotographing companion's subsequent memory to a degree comparable to taking photos oneself. Mechanistically, we dissociate cognitive offloading from attentional disengagement. Instructing photographers to delete each photo immediately, thereby removing any expectation of later access, left both the self- and companion-PTIE unchanged, arguing against cognitive offloading as a primary driver. By contrast, preventing a nonphotographing companion from seeing the act of photo-taking with an opaque barrier abolished the companion-PTIE, implicating attentional disengagement as the causal pathway. Robust Bayesian meta-analyses estimated a reliable companion-PTIE with no meaningful difference in magnitude from the self-PTIE. These findings reframe the PTIE as a social phenomenon: The memory costs of ubiquitous photography extend beyond photographers to copresent others, revealing how everyday technologies reshape collective memory for shared experiences. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).