The Department of Psychology is delighted to announce the next online talk of the Mind Meeting Seminar Series.
On Thursday 10th March 2022, 3.30 pm CET, Professor Morgan Barense (University of Toronto, Canada) will give a talk entitled “Enhancing real-world event memory: Insights from the HippoCamera, a smartphone intervention”.
The talk will take place virtually via Zoom. Please contact us at psy-office@cbs.mpg.de if you are interested in taking part.
Abstract
The act of remembering an everyday experience influences how we interpret the world, how we think about the future, and how we perceive ourselves. It also enhances long-term retention of the recalled content, increasing the likelihood that it will be recalled again. Unfortunately, the ability to recollect event-specific details tends to decline with age, resulting in an impoverished ability to mentally re-experience the past. This shift has been linked to a corresponding decline in the distinctiveness of hippocampal memory representations. Despite these well-established changes, there are few effective cognitive behavioral interventions that target real-world episodic memory. We addressed this gap by developing a smartphone-based application called HippoCamera that allows participants to record labelled videos of everyday events and subsequently replay standardized, high-fidelity autobiographical memory cues. In two experiments with older adults, we found that using HippoCamera to repeatedly reactivate memories for real-world events improved episodic recollection and it evoked more positive autobiographical sentiment at the time of retrieval. Moreover, more detailed recollection was associated with more differentiated memory signals in the hippocampus. I will also present research investigating the optimal time to reactivate a memory, as well as which features of distinct memories should be emphasized to maximize their perceived similarity.
