Work

The Effect of Augmented Reality on Involuntary Autobiographical Memory

Year: 2025

Type: conference-paper

Abstract: We know little about the impact of augmented reality (AR) on human cognition, particularly regarding involuntary autobiographical memory (IAM).IAMs are spontaneous recollections of personal events, ubiquitous in daily life but under-researched in both psychology and human-computer interaction.We first discuss the potential opportunities and risks of replacing conventional displays with AR to increase the likelihood of IAMs.We then report on a study investigating whether stimuli displayed on the same mobile device using video-see-through AR are more likely to resurface than those shown with a simple 3D viewer.We found that AR elicits approximately twice as many IAMs in controlled settings with immediate re-exposure to contextual cues, but no measurable effect was found in everyday settings with delayed re-exposure.Therefore, AR can enhance IAMs, but its effects may be modest and short-lived in most cases.Nevertheless, future studies could reveal stronger effects of AR in other settings.Supplementary material is available at osf.io/gscpv/.

Source: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

DOI: 10.1145/3706598.3713922

Authors: Leana Petiot, Hélène Sauzeon, Pierre Dragicevic

Institutions: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Institut national de recherche en sciences et technologies du numérique

Language: English

Topic: Augmented Reality Applications

Subfield: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

Field: Computer Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: hybrid

Funder: Agence Nationale de la Recherche

Award: Situated Visualizations for Personal Analytics