Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This study examined how episodic memory performance in young and older adults is influenced by both the physical and psychological representations of locations in everyday life. Over five weeks, participants' GPS location data were collected via a smartphone app and later used in a memory recall test and post-survey. Results showed that both physical and psychological sparsity (i.e., the degree to which a location was spatially or psychologically distinct from others) positively affected memory performance in both age groups. However, only young adults exhibited an interaction effect between physical and psychological sparsity on response accuracy. This difference may stem from older adults' narrower GPS sparsity distribution and fewer location points, suggesting that their narrower range of visited locations was insufficient to reveal this interaction. Our study offers a novel contribution by quantitatively utilizing a psychological measure of memory representation through personalized data and analyzing its relationship with a physical indicator.