A picture may not be worth a thousand words after all, if you're the one taking the picture.

New scientific findings out of Fairfield University in Connecticut, and published in the journal Psychological Science, suggest people who took photographs of objects seen during a museum tour were less likely to remember facts about their visit than others who gazed at the museum items.

The study's author, Linda Henkel, a psychologist at Fairfield, explained that quite often people point their cameras and start shooting images almost thoughtlessly, to the point of personally missing the moment in time that they were working so hard to memorialize.

For her research, Henkel recruited 28 subjects to tour the university's Bellarmine Museum of Art.

While all of the study participants were directed to pause in front of 30 different objects on display, some were randomly selected to take photos of individual objects. In total, participants simply observed 15 artifacts and photograph the other 15 displays.

The following day. Henkel's team tested the participants, asking the group to write down the names of the objects they saw and also offer detailed answers to questions about the tour.

Henkel determined study participants had marked trouble remembering the objects they photographed, a phenomenon she's dubbed the "photo-taking impairment effect."

When people rely on technology to remember things for them, "counting on the camera to record the event and thus not needing to attend to it fully themselves, it can have a negative impact on how well they remember their experiences," she said. That fact is especially relevant in today's social media-dominated world, in which people automatically take on-the-spot pictures and immediately post them on sites such as Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. Do they realize how much of the experience they missed, Henkel wonders.

In addition, "research has suggested that the sheer volume and lack of organization of digital photos for personal memories discourages many people from accessing and reminiscing about them," Henkel said. "In order to remember, we have to access and interact with the photos, rather than just amass them."

When Henkel sent a second group of study participants through the museum, those taking photographs were told to focus on specific details of the display objects by using the zoom feature on their cameras.

Afterward, those in the second group retained much greater memory detail about the total tour, not just the objects focused on.

Henkel says the varied results of the two tours showed ways the human mind and camera are different.

Photos, she asserted, appear to help individuals remember events, as long as they also make the effort to both observe and review the event they are recording.