Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We investigated whether memories of different time scales(i.e., week, day, hour) are used independently (i.e., indepen-dence of scales). To overcome the limitations of previousstudies that have low ecological validity in selecting the teststimuli, we used experience sampling technology. Participantswore a smartphone around their neck for two weeks, whichwas equipped with an app.that automatically collected time,images, GPS, audio and accelerometry. After a one-week re-tention interval, participants were presented with an image thatwas captured during their data collection phase, and tested ontheir memory of when the event happened (i.e., week, day ofweek, and hour). We find that, in contrast to previous studies,memories of different time scales were not retrieved indepen-dently in everyday life. Additionally, we replicated previouslaboratory findings such as correlations between confidencerating and memory performance, and patterns found betweenvalence rating and memory accuracy.