Yura Choi ¹ Kawon Kim ² Sunwoo Moon ³ Geunseong Jung ³ Jae-Hyuk Cha ³ Hyungwook Yim ^1*

• ¹ Department of Cognitive Sciences, Hanyang University, Seoul, Republic of Korea
• ² Department of Psychology, College of Arts & Sciences, University of South Dakota, Vermillion, South Dakota, United States
• ³ Department of Computer Science, Hanyang University, Seoul, Republic of Korea, Seoul, Republic of Korea

We investigated the context-dependent memory effect outside of the laboratory in order to examine whether the effect impacts everyday memory retrieval. We also examined various factors that may interact with the context-dependent memory effect such as frequency and context dwell time. In the experiment, we used a smartphone app to track participant's GPS locations for five weeks. Participants, during their daily lives, were then asked to recall their locations at a specific date and time by choosing from all locations visited in the previous five weeks. Results demonstrated the existence of the context-dependent memory effect in a real-world setting, with low-frequency locations showing a stronger context-dependent memory effect -benefiting more from the matched context. We also found that for low-frequency locations, the benefit of the context-dependent memory effect increased as the participant spent more time in the context (context dwelling time).The study provides a novel way to examine the context-dependent memory effect outside of the laboratory, which not only enables to measure an individual's genuine memories in a more ecologically valid way, but also investigates factors that would be challenging to examine in the laboratory.