Captured Memories: The Impact of First-Person vs. Third-Person Viewpoint Photographs on Remembering Personal Experiences

Abstract

People take a staggering number of photos to capture experiences. How do features of the photos people review affect how they will remember these experiences? Across five studies, both in field settings and using respondents' own experiences and photos (N = 709), we find that reviewing a single or multiple photos that included the self, shifts people's memories towards an observer's memory perspective, rather than that of their original experience. However, when reviewing photos that depict a first-person viewpoint, memories are recalled more from an actor's memory perspective. While prior research explicitly instructed people to adopt a particular viewpoint during recall without photos, or examined the effect of recall involving photos correlationally, we causally demonstrate how this shift can occur naturally, by simply reviewing photos.

Keywords: remembering, photos, memory perspective, actor, observer