Novel experiences create a penumbra of enhanced autobiographical memory: evidence from a daily diary study

Our everyday lives are comprised of multidimensional events involving people, places, and emotions, both new and familiar. A core focus of memory research is to understand how these features may influence memory. While much prior work has investigated these facets of memory using controlled laboratory studies, the current study aimed to understand how features of real-world experiences influence autobiographical memory. To this end, we enrolled participants in an intensive longitudinal “daily diary” study that asked participants to record a wide range of rich information about their experiences each day for two weeks. Participants reported written descriptions of three events that they had engaged in each day, as well as quantitative metrics of novelty of these experiences and their day in general (e.g., how typical a day felt, whether they visited a new location). The written event descriptions were used to prospectively test participants’ autobiographical memory after a two-week delay. Our findings suggest that novelty bolsters both subjective vividness and objective level of detail reported in the memory test. Furthermore, we find that the benefit of novelty extends to other non-novel events that occurred within the same day, and that multiple sources of novelty independently and cumulatively improve memory. These data suggest that novel experiences enhance memory, and that daily diaries are a valuable method to naturalistically investigate these processes.