Socrates once feared that technology would corrupt human memory. Quaint as it sounds today, he was worried about a form of communication called writing. The more easily people could access something in a document, he reasoned, the less inclined they’d be to remember it.

The great philosopher’s point rings as true in the digital age as it did in ancient Greece. Recent tests have found that people who think a computer will save their information recall much less of it than those led to believe the machine will delete it. A difficult trivia question is as likely to bring Google to mind as it is the answer.

The more easily people can take and access pictures, the less inclined they may be to remember the moment itself.

Fairfield University psychologist Linda Henkel believes something similar may be happening with digital photography. The more easily people can take and access pictures, she says, the less inclined they may be to remember the moment itself. “You’re just kind of mentally discounting it–thinking, ‘Well, the camera’s got it,'” Henkel tells Co.Design.

Henkel draws that conclusion from a study she recently conducted at the Bellarmine Museum of Art on Fairfield’s campus. In one of her experiments, she gave test participants a digital camera and an itinerary of museum objects to view. Some of the objects were simply observed. Some were photographed whole with the digital camera. Some were photographed with explicit instructions to zoom in on a detail.

The following day, Henkel gathered the participants and tested their memories about the museum experience. She showed them the names (or pictures) of all the objects they’d seen, as well as 10 they hadn’t, and asked them whether or not they’d gone up to the item, and if so whether they’d simply observed it or photographed it. For each item they said they saw, she also questioned them about a detail.

Socrates would have enjoyed the results. Test participants recognized fewer objects they’d photographed whole than those they’d observed on their museum tour (from both the list of names and the roster of pictures). They were also much less accurate in recalling visual details of museum objects they’d photographed whole, compared with those they’d only observed. Simply put, they took the picture and missed the moment.