Schedule of Events | Symposia

Symposium Session 8 - Memory in the palm of your hand: New smartphone techniques for measuring emotion and memories of real-life experiences

Symposium Session 8: Monday, March 31, 2025, 10:00 am – 12:00 pm EDT, Constitution B

Chair: Elizabeth Goldfarb¹; ¹Yale University
Presenters: Elizabeth Goldfarb, Julia Pratt, Rajita Sinha, Stephanie Wemm, Morgan Barense, Nelly Matorina, Lila Davachi, Victoria Schelkun, Camille Gasser, Kathryn Lockwood, Erin Welch, David Clewett, Mason McClay, Janys Li, Christina Sandman

Our memories emerge from our complex and emotionally dynamic everyday experiences. However, many episodic memory studies take place in controlled laboratory settings, which, while offering precision, raise questions about how well these findings apply to real-world memory. To truly capture the dynamic and meaningful nature of memories for daily life, more sophisticated approaches are needed, methods that are now increasingly possible through novel applications of smartphone technology. In this symposium, we highlight new smartphone-based techniques for capturing different aspects of everyday experiences and quantifying how they are remembered. These approaches are feasible, acceptable to participants, and provide key insights. We present methodological and analytical advances in intensive longitudinal sampling and demonstrate how they enable us to address new questions about how memories are encoded, stored, and retrieved in daily life. We will discuss how a variety of factors, including emotion, novelty, alcohol, and dreams, alter the richness and organization of autobiographical memories. These real-world findings both validate and challenge models of memory derived from observations in laboratory-based experiments. Together, these studies show how advances in smartphone-related monitoring techniques can open up exciting new avenues for human memory research.

Presentations

Leveraging ecological momentary assessment to capture memory for clinically relevant experiences

Elizabeth Goldfarb¹, Julia Pratt¹, Rajita Sinha¹, Stephanie Wemm¹; ¹Yale University

Memory plays a key role in alcohol use, as what people learn and remember about their experiences with alcohol can drive later drinking. However, we know little about how individuals who engage in riskier patterns of drinking encode and retain such alcohol-related episodes, and whether laboratory observations of these processes extend to memories for real drinking experiences. In a set of experiments, we measured memories for alcohol-related events in the laboratory (including photographs portraying alcoholic beverages) and, using smartphones, memories for real alcohol drinking experiences. Our participants included social drinkers who engaged in light to risky patterns of drinking. Borrowing techniques from clinical ecological momentary assessment, participants received random prompts throughout the day and created user-initiated reports when they had their first drink of the day during a two-week monitoring period. In each prompt, they reported on different features of the event (e.g., where they were, who they were with, and how they were feeling). The next morning, we prompted participants to report their memory for these events. The smartphone-based approach yielded high completion rates and above-chance memory accuracy. Critically, we found differences in how event valence and the presence of alcohol modulated accuracy across settings. Using a new memory integration computation, we also found that positive and alcohol-related events were more integrated in both settings. This smartphone-based memory sampling approach provides a feasible method to study memory for real and clinically meaningful experiences, providing ecologically valid insight to the organization of memories associated with maladaptive behavior.

Characterizing the impact of a night of sleep and dreaming on memory for real-life experiences

Morgan Barense¹, Nelly Matorina¹; ¹University of Toronto

Sleep plays a role in the consolidation of episodic memories, yet surprisingly little is known about how the very first night of sleep impacts real-life, autobiographical memories. Moreover, dreaming about a laboratory task has been shown to improve memory for that task, suggesting that dreaming may also promote memory consolidation. Using a smartphone-based memory sampling approach, we collected high-fidelity autobiographical memory cues from everyday experiences and administered multiple at-home memory tests per day in a population of participants who frequently remembered their dreams. Over the course of two weeks, participants recorded one morning and one evening event from their everyday lives on a smartphone application. They also completed two memory tests per day (one in the morning and evening) that assessed the memory from approximately 8-12 hours prior (i.e., the evening memory test pertained to the morning event and the morning test pertained to the evening event from the night before). Across a converging set of measures, we found that sleep impacted autobiographical memory richness, such that after a sleep delay, compared to a wake delay, memories were reported as more vivid, easier to recall, and felt closer in time. We also found that the memories participants reported dreaming about were associated with preserved emotional strength and an increase in negativity. Both sleep and dreaming were associated with increased memory integration as measured through similarity ratings. Overall, we provide real-world evidence that sleep preserves autobiographical memory richness and that dreaming is involved in emotional processing of these memories.

Real-life impact of experiential novelty on memory and mood

Lila Davachi¹, Victoria Schelkun¹, Camille Gasser¹, Kathryn Lockwood¹, Erin Welch¹; ¹Columbia University

Motivated by subjective observations that memory was adversely affected by the pandemic lifestyle involving very little change in our spatial and social environments, we hypothesized that variation in experience and novelty may be broadly important for memory. Using an intensive longitudinal “daily diary” study, we examined the relationships between experiential novelty, emotions and real-world autobiographical event memory. Participants provided descriptions of three events per day for two weeks as well as additional information about their overall daily mood and specific details (social, spatial, emotional) about each event. After a delay of two weeks, memory for these events was tested. First, we found that novel events were remembered more vividly and with greater episodic detail than familiar events. Furthermore, we found that non-novel events that occurred on the same day as a novel event were also better remembered. This shows that novelty can exert a penumbra effect on other more typical experiences of each day, improving their retention. Novel events were also associated with more emotion (both positive and negative) and greater daily physical activity correlated with greater positive emotion for a given day. Other factors that improved autobiographical memory were steps taken and spending time with others. This real-world data collection allowed us to test specific targeted hypotheses about experiential novelty and autobiographical memory while also collecting a rich, multidimensional dataset allowing us to place these effects in their daily context of behaviors, emotions and social experiences.

Using a novel web app to examine dynamic emotional states and their relation to memory and symptoms of psychopathology

David Clewett¹, Mason McClay¹, Janys Li¹, Christina Sandman¹; ¹University of California, Los Angeles

Emotional flexibility, or the ability to express appropriate emotional reactions in response to one’s environment, is thought to be reduced in emotion-related psychiatric disorders. However, current paradigms that measure emotional flexibility fail to capture emotion dynamics outside of the laboratory. Further, it is unclear how navigating one’s emotional experiences in real-time relates to the structure and organization of autobiographical memories. In a pre-registered study, we tested if fluctuations in emotional reactions to custom musical pieces relate to symptoms of depression and trauma as well as the content and structure of memory. To capture continuous emotional changes, we developed a novel mobile emotion tracking application called the Mobile Emotion Compass. After the music task, we also instructed participants to self-organize three autobiographical memories into paragraphs, or “chapters”, providing insight into the subjective structure of their memories. Our results revealed that across participants, lower average valence ratings (i.e., more negative emotion) and higher variability in valence ratings across music listening were associated with higher self-reported symptoms of trauma. Additionally, the number of self-indicated event memories was positively correlated with more normative emotional ratings to the songs, suggesting that the structure of accessed events relates to more prototypical emotional responding. Finally, we also found that the complexity of recall corresponded with a lower likelihood of remaining in a low-movement, less variable emotional state during music listening. Together, these results reveal how inflexible or unusual emotional responses may relate to impaired memory for everyday events.