Recall and Organization of Real-Life Memories

The 1 Second Everyday app is a popular video diary app that allows users to record 1 second of their day and compiles their daily clips each year. This is a rich and raw source of user’s daily memories spanning many years; the app originally launched in 2013 and has millions of users. In partnership with the 1 Second Everyday app, we have recruited users (N = 50) to share their yearly compilations with us from the duration of their app usage to participate in a pilot version of the study. After receiving their video compilations, we extract a list of all dates they have recorded memories (each frame shows the date that the video was recorded), along with their respective frames. We have designed a task that shows these frames back to the participant (with the original event date blocked out) to interact with their memories in a survey and timeline task. In the survey task, we ask participants to answer questions about 100 randomized, but temporally equidistant (relative to the total days of individual participant usage) posts. We first ask participants to view the event frame and tag the location that this event occurred in on a map. We then ask them to guess the date of the event, and ask how confident they are about that date they provided. Participants then rank how strongly they remember the event, how unique the event was, and the emotionality of the event. Then, we ask them to provide information about who is in the frame and where the event occurred. In a pilot version of the study, we find that date guess accuracy is more precise when the event is highly memorable, very unique, and more emotionally extreme (very negative and positive). We also find that date guess accuracy is higher for recent years. In the subsequent timeline task, we show participants 20 sets of 5 images from the pool of 100 images they have already seen in the survey task. Around half of the pages have all 5 images from the same year, while the rest are mixed-year. The 5 images are shown to the participants in randomized order, and they are asked to order the 5 events in chronological order on a line, using the distance between each image on the line as a proxy for how far apart they feel in their memory. After, in a separate section, we ask participants to report and describe all major life events - they are asked to provide a date, description, and rating of emotional and personal impact about the life event. When investigating the distance between each pair of images from the timeline task, we first find that timeline distance is highly related to temporal distance, as in the days between the posts on the line is strongly related to how far apart they are placed. We also find that when a life event occurs between the pair, the distance between them is greater. This is significant in our sensitive, within-year pages, as well as our broader, mixed year pages. In the same-year pages, we also see that when an event has occurred between the pair, the rate of ordering accuracy (images placed in correct chronological order) is higher. In a smaller pilot sample (N = 30), we see that when the events are more personally impactful, the timeline distance between them is larger. In this pre-registration, we seek to replicate these two main findings across the two tasks: (1) increased accuracy for memorable, unique, and emotionally intense memories and (2) life events increase accuracy and distance between ordered images.