Birthday memories: an experimental think-aloud study on autobiographical remembering in the digital age

In today's digital world, people are documenting their lives more extensively than ever before. To investigate how this pervasive (digital) documentation shapes the way individuals reconstruct and recall personally relevant events, we conducted a preregistered experimental think-aloud study in which participants (N = 40; German sample) were asked to remember their birthdays from 2019 and 2024 in as much detail as possible. Participants completed the study in their usual home environments and were allowed to consult any external resources that they wanted to consult. The results demonstrate that participants almost exclusively used digital external resources. Moreover, participants relied more heavily on external resources when recalling the more distant birthday. Importantly, the use of external resources was an overall adaptive strategy, insofar as it helped participants gain new insights that went beyond what they could recall from internal memory alone. This provides further evidence that integrating information stored in one's mind and information stored in the environment is a potentially beneficial and symbiotic process.