ABSTRACT
Our lives are full of memorable and important moments, as well as important items of information. The last few years have seen the proliferation of digital devices intended to support prosthetic memory (PM), to help users recall experiences, conversations and retrieve personal information. We nevertheless have little systematic understanding of when and why people might use such devices, in preference to their own organic memory (OM). Although OM is fallible, it may be more efficient than accessing information from a complex PM device. We report a controlled lab study which investigates when and why people use PM and OM. We found that PM use depended on users' evaluation of the quality of their OM, as well as PM device properties. In particular, we found that users trade-off Accuracy and Efficiency, preferring rapid access to potentially inaccurate information over laborious access to accurate information. We discuss the implications of these results for future PM design and theory. Rather than replacing OM, future PM designs need to focus on allowing OM and PM to work in synergy.
- Abowd G.D., Harvel L.D., Brotherton J.A. BuildingallA Digital Library of Captured Educational Experiences. In Proc. ICDL 2000, Kyoto, Japan (2000), 395--402.Google Scholar
- Bush V. As We May Think. In Atlantic Monthly 76 (2) (1945), 101--108.Google Scholar
- Dickie C., Vertegaal R., Chen D., Fono D., Cheng D., Sohn C. Augmenting and Sharing Memory with EyeBlog. In Proc. CARPE 2004. NYC, ACM Press (2004), 105--109. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Dumais S.T., Cutrell E., Cadiz J.J., Jancke G., Sarin R., Robbins D.C. Stuff I've Seen: A system for personal information retrieval and re-use. In Proc. SIGIR 2003, Toronto, Canada, ACM Press (2003), 72--79. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Gemmell J., Bell G., Lueder R. MyLifeBits: a personal database for everything. In Comm. of the ACM, 49 (1) (2006), 88--95. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Karger D.R., Bakshi K., Huynh D., Quan D., Sinha V. Haystack: A Customizable General-Purpose Information Management Tool for End Users of Semistructured Data. In Proc. CIDRall2003, Aslomar, California (2003).Google Scholar
- Kazman R., Hunt W., Mantei M. Dynamic Meeting Annotation and Indexing . In Proc DMS 1995. HonoluluallHI (1995), 11--18.Google Scholar
- Kidd A. The marks are on the knowledge worker. In Proc. CHI 1994 Conference on Computer Human Interaction. ACM Press, New York (1994), 186--191. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Lamming M., Flynn M. "Forget-me-not" intimate computing in support of human memory. Tech rep. Rank Xerox, EuroPARC, Cambridge, UK (1994), 94--103.Google Scholar
- Landay J. A., Kaugmann T.R. User Interface Issues in Mobile Computing. In Proc. WWOS-IV 1993, IEEE Press (1993), 40--47.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Mann S., Fung J., Aimone C., Sehgal A., Chen, D. Designing EyeTap Digital Eyeglasses for Continuous Lifelong Capture and Sharing of Personal Experiences. In Proc. CHI 2005 Conference on Computer Human Interaction, ACM Press (2005).Google Scholar
- Rhodes B. J., Maes P. Just-in-time Information Retrieval Agents. In IBM Systems Journal 2000. 39: 685--704. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Sellen A.J., Louie G., Harris J.E., Wilkins A.J. What Brings Intentions to Mind? In Memory 5(4) (1997), 483--507.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Sellen A. J., Fogg A., Hodges S., Wood K. Do Life-Logging Technologies Support Memory for the Past? An Experimental Study Using SenseCam. In Press to appear in. CHI 2007 Conference on Computer Human Interaction, NY: ACM Press. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Stifelman L., Arons, B., and Schmandt, C. Augmented real-world objects: a paper--based audio notebook. In Proc. CHI 1996 Conference on Computer Human Interaction, Vancouver, Canada, 2001, ACM Press, New York, NY (2001), 182--189. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Whittaker S., Hyland P., Wiley M. Filochat: handwritten notes provide access to recorded conversations. In Proc. CHI 1994, Conference on Computer Human Interaction, Boston MA. ACM Press, New York, NY (1994), 271--277. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Whittaker S., Hirschberg J., Amento L., Stark L., Bacchiani M., Isenhour P., Stead L, Zamchick G., Rosenberg A. SCANMail: A Voicemail interface that makes speech browsable, readable and searchable. In Proc. CHI 2002 Conference on Computer Human Interaction, Minnesota, USA (2002), 275--282. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Whittaker S., Hirschberg J. Look or Listen: Discovering Effective Techniques for Accessing Speech Data. In Proc. CHI 1998 Conference on Computer Human Interaction. Springer-Verlag (2003), 253--269.Google Scholar
- Whittaker S., Sidner C. Email overload: exploring personal information management of email. In Proc. of CHI 1996 Conference on Computer Human Interaction, NY: ACM Press, 276--283. Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- Software or wetware?: discovering when and why people use digital prosthetic memory
Recommendations
Cueing digital memory: how and why do digital notes help us remember?
BCS-HCI '08: Proceedings of the 22nd British HCI Group Annual Conference on People and Computers: Culture, Creativity, Interaction - Volume 1People are aware of the fact that their memories are fallible. As a result, they spend significant amounts of time preparing for subsequent memory challenges, e.g. by leaving themselves reminders. Recent findings suggest, however, that people's ability ...
MemX: Virtualization of Cluster-Wide Memory
ICPP '10: Proceedings of the 2010 39th International Conference on Parallel ProcessingWe present MemX -- a distributed system that virtualizes cluster-wide memory to support data-intensive and large memory workloads in virtual machines (VMs). MemX provides a number of benefits in virtualized settings: (1) VM workloads that access large ...
Rethinking Design Metrics for Datacenter DRAM
MEMSYS '15: Proceedings of the 2015 International Symposium on Memory SystemsOver the years, the evolution of DRAM has provided a little improvement in access latencies, but has been optimized to deliver greater peak bandwidths from the devices. The combined bandwidth in a contemporary multi-socket server system runs into ...
Comments