The conventional wisdom is that taking pictures reduces a traveler's chance of remembering a trip's details.
This opinion was summed up nicely by the actress Julie Delpy in the 2007 movie 2 Days in Paris:
Taking pictures all the time turns you into an observer. It automatically takes you out of the moment... For our trip to Venice I wanted to be in the moment, with Jack. But, instead of kissing on the gondola, Jack took 48 pictures on the gondola...
Given such anecdotal evidence, some people may assume that travelers who take selfies are less likely to remember their vacations than those who go device-free.
But if you’re tempted to think that, think again.
Researchers who surveyed more than 700 summer travelers from a half-dozen countries find that travelers who snapped photos and selfies on vacation “were 40% more likely to remember their vacations well than those who didn’t.”
The study was built by the University of Texas at Austin, led by psychologist Art Markman, with support by Hanover Research, and was funded aby vacation rental brand HomeAway.
The study also finds that “Instagram users were 24% more likely than Facebook users to have clear memories of how they felt during their vacations.”
In another finding that may vindicate the cause of “budget travel,” the cost of a vacation “did not have an effect on its memorability, regardless of whether travelers spent $100 or $5,000.”
Travelers from the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy were surveyed before, during, and after their vacations.
In case the results lead you to want to spend all of your time fiddling with your phones and other devices on vacation, remember that there can be too much of a good thing. The study says that travelers who spent more than two hours using phones and other devices were 26% less likely to remember vacation details. That claim is based on the result of a subset of the 700 travelers
Just one hour of device usage each day led to an average of 43% greater difficulty in remembering their trips later, compared to those who worked less than an hour a day.
So it's all about moderation. Everyone has seen tourists at famous destinations spending so much time taking photographs that they seem to be hardly have any time left to admire the sights and sounds without the aid of technology. But the technology can be used as a memory aid, according to the Homeaway sponsored research.
For details, check out the "science of travel memories" study by Markman — a former executive editor of the journal Cognitive Science.