Can Less be More? Contrasting Limited, Unlimited, and Automatic Picture Capture for Augmenting Memory Recall

Academic paper published in Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT), Vol. 1, No. 2, Article 21, June 2017. DOI: 10.1145/3090086. Authors: Evangelos Niforatos and Marc Langheinrich (Faculty of Informatics, Università della Svizzera italiana, Lugano) and Caterina Cinel, Cathleen Cortis Mack and Geoff Ward (Department of Psychology, University of Essex). The original PDF on pc.inf.usi.ch is no longer available (404); the copy preserved as `paper.pdf` (22 pages) was retrieved from the Internet Archive Wayback Machine (snapshot 2023-11-07).

Abstract (from the paper)

Today's abundance of cheap digital storage in the form of tiny memory cards put literally no bounds on the number of images one can capture with one's digital camera or smartphone during an event. However, prior work has shown that taking many pictures may actually make us remember less of a particular event. Does automated picture taking (lifelogging) help avoid this, yet still offer to capture meaningful pictures? In this work, we investigate the effect of capture modality (i.e., limited, unlimited, automatic, and no capture) on people's ability to recall a past event — with and without the support of the pictures captured through these modalities. Our results from a field experiment with 83 participants show that capturing fewer pictures does not necessarily lead to the capture of more relevant pictures. However, when controlling for number of pictures taken, our results show that having a limited number of pictures to capture may lead to pictures with increased memory value. At the same time, automated capture failed to produce pictures that would help remember the past experience better.

Relevance: the Narrative Clip

The Narrative Clip — the wearable lifelogging camera made by Narrative AB, co-founded by Martin Källström — is the central lifelogging apparatus of the study (mentioned over 40 times):

• Participants in the "automatic" capture condition (Group D) were equipped with a 1st-generation Narrative Clip during a guided city tour: "a lightweight wearable camera that one can clip onto one's clothes (typically at or below neck height) for capturing pictures automatically every 30 seconds," letting them focus on the tour while drawing on literally hundreds of images to remember it later.

• The paper positions the product in the lineage of memory-augmentation research: "The Narrative Clip 2 could be considered the most recent and most compact successor of SenseCam, and is intended for capturing everyday life experiences. The Clip captures pictures automatically every 30 seconds, while also supporting video capture, GPS tracking and Wi-Fi/Bluetooth connectivity for synchronizing content with mobile and desktop devices. The Narrative Clip can also explicitly capture a picture by 'double tapping' on it."

• The study's headline finding regarding the device: automated capture with the Narrative Clip produced large volumes of pictures, but these did not help participants remember the experience better than manually captured pictures — an empirically grounded data point in the debate on the memory value of passive lifelogging.