Camera

Does taking photographs ruin your memory?

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A scientist wanted to find out whether photographing objects affects what’s remembered about them. She found that the impact was huge but there might be more to it
  • A man photographs a statue entitled Pentateuque
Is the man more likely to remembe the elephant on his back without the photo? Is the elephant less likely to remember the man under his feet? Photograph: Wong Maye-E/AP

On a guided tour of an art museum early this year, 28 university students were told to simply observe 15 objects and to photograph 15 others. Dr Linda Henkel was studying the students all the while to measure whether taking photographs affected their memory.

The next day, the students were asked to remember the objects and their details. The results demonstrate what Dr Henkel calls a “photo-taking-impairment effect“.

If participants took a photo of each object as a whole, they remembered fewer objects and remembered fewer details about the objects and the objects’ locations in the museum than if they instead only observed the objects and did not photograph them.

Zoom to remember

There’s a lot more to it though. The study found that if the students changed their behaviour even slightly, the effect on memory was entirely different; zooming in to photograph part of an object actually improved memory. What’s more, students who focused the lens on a specific area could even recall parts that weren’t zoomed in on.

Dr Henkel concluded that additional “cognitive processes” (i.e. thinking and paying attention) “can eliminate the photo-taking-impairment effect”.

What did the scientist forget?

There are a few other caveats that it’s worth adding:

1. Plenty of photos aren’t about capturing the detail on a terracotta vase or the brush strokes on a painting – they’re about registering an emotion. Many people still recall the feelings of something (a wedding, a birth, a summer) in great detail, even if they can’t remember the caterers or the flowers.

2. Interest matters. If asked to open 20 new windows in your browser of 20 different articles and take screenshots of some of them, it’s likely that the ones you remember are the ones you were likely to read – the ones with the titles or pictures that seem interesting to you. The students’ memory was probably affected by how much they were interested in the objects in the first place. In short, the results might have been very different if the students had chosen what they could photograph.

3. Memory isn’t just about images – it’s about words too. The students were asked to write down the names of the objects they remembered. Presumably, a painting called hippocampus is easier to recall than one called sepultusque est in pulvere hydria.

4. Memory recall isn’t as simple as a ‘do or don’t’. Maybe the students with cameras remembered more details about the objects (albeit more inaccurately) than those without. Is it better to remember 50 facts slightly imprecisely than to remember 1? Would you rather bump into someone that you’d met once and accidentally call them Anna rather than Anne and ask about their 3 children rather than 4 or just bump into them and remember that they fell over the last time you’d met?

5. The study used 28 undergraduate students and 30 objects in the first museum tour then used 46 students and 27 objects in the second study to test the effect of zooming. Changing the students and the objects means that these findings, published in the Journal of Psychological Science, probably aren’t a sufficient reason to stop taking photos.

Have we missed any other caveats? Do you think the research is persuading? Let us know in the comments below

 

Camera takes 3D photos in the dark

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3D images of mannequinOn the left is an image created using current technology – the photo on the right was produced from the MIT team‘s new camera technology
A camera that can create 3D-images in almost pitch black conditions has been developed by researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The team captured images of objects, using just single particles of light, known as a photons.

“Billions” of photons would be required to take a photo using the camera on a mobile phone.

The researchers say the technology could be used to help soldiers on combat operations.

Ahmed Kirmani, who wrote the paper containing the findings, said the research has been called “counter-intuitive” as normally the number of photons detected would tell you how bright an image was.

“With only one photon per pixel you would expect the image to be completely featureless,” he told the BBC.

Combat advantage

The camera technology already existed and is similar to the Lidar system used by Google for its Streetview service he explained.

Mannequin with laser
Lidar uses laser pulses and the team used the reflected photons to create their 3D image

“We borrowed the principles form this, the detectors can identify single photons but they still need hundreds of thousands to form images. But we took the system to its limit.”

Lidar uses a laser to fire pulses of light towards an object in a grid sequence. Each location on the grid corresponds to a pixel in the final image.

Normally the laser would fire a large number of times at each grid position and detect multiple reflected photons.

In contrast the system used by the MIT team moved on to the next position in the grid as soon as it had detected a single photon.

A conventional Lidar system would require about 100 times as many photons to make a similar image to the one the team captured which means the system could provide “substantial savings in energy and time”.

The team say the technology could be used in many different fields. It could help ophthalmologists when they want to create an image of a patient’s eye without having to shine a bright light in someone’s eye.

The research was part funded by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency which commissions research for the Department of Defense. Mr Kirmani said the military could use the technology to allow soldiers to see in the dark, giving them an advantage in combat situations.

Slide from MIT presentation
Current 3D imaging techniques require more than single photons unlike the team’s new system

“Any technology that enhances a military’s ability to navigate, target or engage in near-total darkness would be highly prized. 3D imagery married with existing imagery and navigation technologies could significantly enhance the capabilities currently possessed,” said Reed Foster, a defence analyst at IHS.

Eventually, the researchers explain, the technology could be developed to make 3D cameras for mobile phones. The camera requires less light than the ones currently available and therefore uses less power.

Study shows side-channel phone risk via microphone and camera.

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Researchers exploring smartphone security vulnerabilities are increasingly turning to information about smartphone sensors as pathways to security breach. Earlier this year, a Stanford University team warned that sensors such as accelerometers could identify a device and track it. In 2012, a paper titled “Practicality of Accelerometer Side Channels on Smartphones” by researchers from the University of Pennsylvania reported that by analyzing data gathered by accelerometers they were able to get a good idea of the PIN or pattern used to protect a phone. Now a study by two researchers at Cambridge University set out to show that a smartphone PIN can be identified via the smartphone camera and microphone. Smartphone rsearchers Ross Anderson, Professor of Security Engineering at the Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge and Laurent Simon, also of the Computer Laboratory, demonstrated an attack that can reveal the PIN codes for sensitive apps, such as those for banking, by tapping into the microphone and camera.. They wrote about their finding in the paper, “PIN Skimmer: Inferring PINs Through the Camera and Microphone.” Their study was presented at a recent workshop on Security and Privacy in Smartphones and Mobile Devices (SPSM) in Berlin.

“In this paper,” they wrote, “we aim to raise awareness of side-channel attacks even when strong isolation protects sensitive applications. Previous works have studied the use of the phone accelerometer and gyroscope as side channel data to infer PINs. Here, we describe a new side-channel attack that makes use of the video and to infer PINs entered on a number-only soft key-board on a smartphone.”

Their attack was achieved through a program called PIN Skimmer. They found that codes entered on a number-only soft keypad could be identified. Their feat involves software that watches the smartphone user’s face by means of the camera and listens to clicks through the microphone as the victim types. The microphone can detect touch as a user enters the PIN, taking in the clicks made by the smartphone from the user pressing on the virtual number keys. The camera estimates the orientation of the phone as the user is doing this and correlates it to the position of the user-tapped digit.

Writing about their work in the security weblog “Light Blue Touchpaper,” Ross Anderson said, “We found that software on your can work out what PIN you’re entering by watching your face through the camera and listening for the clicks as you type. Previous researchers had shown how to work out PINs using the gyro and accelerometer; we found that the camera works about as well. We watch how your face appears to move as you jiggle your phone by typing.”

https://i0.wp.com/cdn.physorg.com/newman/gfx/news/2013/vcgnfxguyv.jpg

The paper reported these results: When selecting from a test set of 50 four-digit PINs, PIN Skimmer correctly infers more than 30 percent of PINs after two attempts, and more than 50 percent of PINs after five attempts on Android-powered phones. When selecting from a set of 200 eight-digit PINs, PIN Skimmer correctly infers about 45 percent of the PINs after five attempts and 60 percent after 10 attempts.

The authors reserved a special section in the paper where they presented possible countermeasures to mitigate side-channel attacks on PIN input. Blogged Anderson: “Meanwhile, if you’re developing payment apps, you’d better be aware that these risks exist.”