The experience sampling method as a new way to explore autobiographical memories

Memory complaints are not always associated with objectively demonstrable memory impairment on traditional memory evaluations. The need for new assessment tools, especially more naturalistic ones, has been highlighted for a long time in order to better reflect everyday memory functioning and its associated memory complaints (Chaytor
& Schmitter-Edgecombe, 2003). In recent years, the Experience Sampling Method (ESM) has gained popularity in psychology to capture cognitive, emotional, and behavioral experiences in everyday life (Moore et al., 2017). These information collections about daily activities could thus be used to create a memory task about personally experienced events in all their multimodal richness, including the emotional, identity, and phenomenological aspects of memories which are generally absent in clinical evaluations and yet essential to memory functioning. In this study, a 26-year-old patient with memory complaints but normal performances on classical neuropsychological assessments received 5 notifications per day for one week on the mobile app m-Path (https://m-path.io/landing/). These notifications invited him to report information about his daily life activities (e.g., what he was doing at the present time, the people he was with, the
emotions he felt, the place where he was, etc.). At the end of the week, he was asked to verbally report 5 of these personally experienced events (selected based on their memorability and frequency) in as much detail as possible. In this pilot study, the richness, specificity, phenomenology, and accuracy of these memories will be explored
and compared with those of 6 matched control subjects, allowing us to determine whether this new memory task can highlight undetected memory difficulties with classical memory tasks.