Memory Media Design Shapes Perceived Temporal Distance of Depicted Historical Events: Color Versus Black and White Photographs

Collective memories are representations of the past pertaining to social identities. Such collective memories are mediated through cultural media like museums, memorials, textbooks, films, and photographs. Media design can shape psychological construal of the depicted events. We examined how design features in historical photographs like color versus black and white formatting impacted subjective temporal distance, that is, how near or far a depicted event feels from the present. For a set of historical photographs, participants estimated how distant the event felt from the present (Experiment 1) and estimated the year in which the event occurred (Experiment 2). Events had a greater temporal distance from the present when they were portrayed by black and white photographs than when portrayed in color, controlling for image content. Additionally, participants could accurately date photographs when in color, but systematically overestimated temporal distance when in black and white. General Audience Summary People maintain collective memories for events important to their groups, but which they did not personally experience. Those memories may be mediated through "memory media" artifacts like photographs. Importantly, design features of those artifacts may shape how we recall the past, and how we represent it in relation to the present. Across two experiments, we demonstrate that when photographs of historical events are presented in black-and-white, they are construed as being more distant from the present than when they are portrayed in color. Interestingly, people are fairly accurate at estimating when events occurred when they are represented in color but are systematically biased toward imagining the event as having happened further in the past than it actually did when the event is represented in black-and-white. These findings have implications for the design of memory media in, for instance, history curricula and museums, particularly given that perceived temporal distance corresponds to a variety of other psychological factors such as concreteness/abstraction and value.