Summary: New research highlights how smartphones are transforming memory science by capturing real world data about sleep, emotion and daily experiences. Studies show that reproducing memories before sleeping, experiencing novel events and feeling positive emotions can strengthen autobiographical memory.
Applications such as Hippocamera reveal that even dreaming of past events improves memory, while various daily experiences improve the liveliness of surrounding memories. These findings are helping scientists understand how memory works outside the laboratory and offers information on the increase in memory in everyday life.
Key facts:
Sleep strengthens memory: memories reviewed before sleep or dreamed are more vivid and easier to remember. Remember the memory reinforcements: experimenting something new improves memory for novel and routine events.
Source: Cognitive Neuroscience Society
A memory is not a straight line from one point to another, even if we sometimes think of them as linear stories.
This key idea that cognitive neuroscientists have known for many years is now guiding a new type of research, to explore not only how memories evolve over time, but also how they can strengthen or change.
Helping researchers with this new exploration is a powerful tool: smartphones.
“Smart phones are an incredible tool to understand the patterns of feelings, behavior and experiences in daily life, and how the different types of daily events remain with us in memory,” says Elizabeth Goldfarb of Yale University, who presides over a session in the annual meeting of the cognitive neuroscience society (CNS) on the use of smartphones in the capture of naturalist data on memory.
“Real experiences have much more importance and self -assessment than anything that can generate in the laboratory, and be able to quantify how people remember those events is very exciting.”
Researchers will share new studies based on smartphones that suggest how a range of actions takes people, from trying something new, reproducing memories before sleep, feeling positive emotions, can help them build stronger and more detailed memories.
“These conversations examine how researchers can use these data to capture how factors such as emotion, novelty and dreams transform memories, and suggest ways in which people can strengthen their own memories,” says Goldfarb.
Memory and sleep repetition
Morgan Barense’s current work using smartphones to capture real -time data about memory, sleep and Dreams was inspired by a fortuitous discovery in a study that was not designed to see sleep and memory.
“We discovered that the moment of when someone reviews the material in relation to the dream had a huge effect on how well they recalled it,” says Barense of the University of Toronto, who will present a new job at the SNC meeting.
“The effect was so surprising that I initially believe it. That discovery made me realize that sleeping is something that all memory scientists should pay close attention.”
Now, working in studies designed by the graduated student Nelly Matorina, Barense and her team are investigating a fundamental question using an application for smartphones that developed that is called Hippocamera: How does a single night of sleep influence our memory for the events that occurred the day before? For example, if you dream of a dinner last night, does that influence your memory for that event?
Using hippocamera, the participants recorded two events per day, one in the morning and one at night, more than two weeks. Then, the researchers tested their memories after 12 -hour delays that included a night of sleep or a day that went awake.
Their results prior to the presentation showed that “memories after sleep were more vivid, they felt temporarily closer and were easier to remember, suggesting that a single night of sleep helps preserve the richness of autobiographical memory,” says Barense.
The researchers also asked the participants to register their dreams when they wake up and indicate whether they were related to events captured with Hipocamera the night before.
“Interestingly, the memories with which they were dreamed were also qualified as temporarily closer and more likely senses that they were remembered from a first person perspective,” she says.
In addition to these short -term effects, the team tested the same memories a year later to ask how they changed over time, including connection to memories locations.
“Our results pattern suggests that the link between an event and its location can initially weaken after a night of sleep to allow memory reorganization, but in the long term, a year later, our memory is strongly connected to where it took place,” says Matorina.
“Real world data collection introduces a variability that is difficult to control, and sleep monitoring and memory with time requires a careful methodological design,” says Barense.
“However, these challenges are also those that make research based on smartphones so promising: it allows us to go beyond artificial environments and study memory as it develops naturally in daily life.”
By illuminating the crucial role of sleep and sleep in memory, Barense and his team hope to obtain windows in the plasticity of memory, if he understands the connection between sleep and our vigil experiences and submitting the foundations for new ways to increase memory.
In future work, in collaboration with Ken Paller and his laboratory at the Northwestern University, his team will investigate whether it is possible to improve real -world memory retention during sleep.
They will integrate the hypocamera with the reactivation of memory directed in the home, which works by reintroducing signals related to memory, such as sounds associated with an event, in the specific sleep stages.
“While our previous work has shown that hypocamera strengthens autobiographical memory in older adults, we believe that the incorporation of sleep -based memory reactivation will further amplify its benefits,” says Barense.
Vividity and novelty of memory
The memory work based on Smart Telephones of Lila Davachi was motivated by the cognitive and emotional impacts of the pandemic that emerged in almost all the conversations that she and the research team had during the closure of COVID-19.
“The laboratory had already published several articles on the impact of the representations of the context in the associative memory and here we were all sitting in our homes, gathering in Zoom, with very few changes in our contexts,” says Davachi of the University of Columbia.
“It was natural to ask how this was going to affect our long -term memories and, perhaps, our mental health.”
Adapting a well -validated data collection method of social psychology, Davachi and his team conducted a “daily newspaper” study that tested real world experiences using an application for smartphones.
They asked the study participants to report daily events for a period of two weeks, and then, after a delay of two weeks, the researchers asked them to remember the autobiographical experiences.
In each day and for each event, participants were asked to classify each event as “novel”, “routine” or “periodic”. In addition to answering several other questions about the events and their days.
Using artificial intelligence (AI) to help analyze the large number of registered subjective events, the team discovered that the new autobiographical events were later reported with greater liveliness and detail compared to routine and newspaper events.
“Perhaps more exciting, we found that the routine and newspaper events that occurred on the same day that a novel event was also better remembered than the routine and newspaper events that took place in days with less novelty,” explains Davachi.
“This suggests a gloom of novelty.”
That novelty improves memory not only for a novel event, but also for adjacent events throughout the day, it suggests that “experimental diversity” is an important factor to form lasting memories, and it is something that people could control.
The work, says Davachi, is approaching researchers to understand how and if memory laboratory studies and their findings translate into autobiographical experiences of the real world.
“Being able to test and record data from individuals in the real world, along with the use of large -based language models based on AI to help us analyze large amounts of complex data, it is a solid springboard,” she says.
Memory and alcohol emotions
For all memory studies, an important challenge is to quantify the accuracy of memory, says Goldfarb of Yale.
“If we asked someone to tell us about an event that happened years ago, we can measure if they tell us the same details consistently, but we do not know if those details are ‘correct’ because we were not there when the event occurred,” he says.
“By using smartphone technology, we can effectively be there with the participant while the event is happening.”
For Goldfarb’s work, these techniques are opening doors to answer new questions, including the way people remember stressful or emotional events. In a study that will present at the CNS conference, Goldfarb and his team are looking for memories and emotions in the context of substance abuse.
Memory is important for addiction, since, for example, someone cannot fall into a place where they used to drink if they have no drinking memory there.
“However, we know very little about what people remember about their time drinking that drives this behavior,” he explains.
With smartphones, researchers can now share what they remember about their real experiences with alcohol and compare it with previous laboratory -based studies.
“We are discovering some similarities with what we measure in the laboratory, which is excellent for establishing ecological validity,” she says.
But when measuring the memories that could directly inform the use of real -life substances, they are also capturing new data, such as how memories are organized for positive and negative experiences differently.
“We are seeing that people are more likely to link different parts of a positive event together in memory,” she says.
“As a researcher, the effects of real emotions are much stronger than we can create in the laboratory.”
Taken together, says Goldfarb, the research presented in CNS 2025, about novelty, repetition and emotion, is a leap forward to help people develop stronger and detailed memories.
About this news, emotion and memory memory news
Author: Lisa Mp Muñoz
Source: Cognitive Neuroscience Society
Contact: Lisa MP Munoz – Cognitive Neuroscience Society
Image: The image is accredited to Neuroscience News
Original Research: The findings will be presented at the 32nd Meeting of the Cognitive Society of Neuroscience
