PHOTMOSPHERE: A System for Amplifying Connection between Memory and Record

Photographs capture information on situations or circumstances that give some clue about users’ access to past activities. The photographs remind them of their personal experiences and of social events that took place at a certain time. Our research intends to use such information to help them recollect events and to acquire novel information by connecting memory and social records, for example, news reports. Toward this end, we propose a system called PHOTMOSPHERE that helps users recollect past events by connecting memory (photographs) and records (news). We conducted an experiment to observe the effect of showing news with photographs. Participants were shown either photographs alone that they had taken or both news reports and photographs they had taken. They were then asked to describe their recollections under both conditions. We found that, in many cases, news reports helped participants remember events, but not in some cases, for instance, when the subject of the photograph was a person or an object. On the basis of this result, we reformulate PHOTMOSPHERE design criteria.