The Fallacy of an Airtight Alibi: Understanding Human Memory for "Where" Using Experience Sampling

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Ubiquitous Computing

Background:

• Alibi-generation research faces challenges in verifying real-world event ground truth.
• Objective data collection is crucial for accurate memory recall studies.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the accuracy of memory recall for real-world events using smartphone-recorded data.
• To identify factors influencing memory errors in alibi-generation contexts.

Main Methods:

• Smartphone app collected accelerometry, GPS, and audio data from 51 adult participants over one month.
• A memory test with a forced-choice procedure was administered after a one-week retention interval.
• Conditional logit analysis was used to assess event aspects influencing decision-making.

Main Results:

• Participants incorrectly identified their location 36% of the time.
• Significant confusion was observed between days across weeks and hours across days.
• Location similarity was a greater source of error than audio or movement similarity.

Conclusions:

• Smartphone-collected data can aid alibi generation but memory recall is imperfect.
• Temporal and spatial context significantly impacts memory accuracy for real-world events.
• Understanding memory confounds is vital for developing reliable alibi-generation systems.