Are episodic context features helpful for refinding tasks? Lessons learnt from a case study with lifelogs

Both psychological theories and findings in information science suggest that people may remember the episodic context of previously encountered information. This implies that a user’s episodic memory might be utilized to improve the efficiency or effectiveness of refinding tasks. In this paper, we report a case study which aims to explore the feasibility of integrating episodic context into the design of information refinding systems. The subjects in this study collected 20 months of rich contextual data along including the full text of all documents, emails, web pages and so on, which they accessed during the collection period. We developed a “memory-friendly” system based on psychological theories to test the hypothesis through user studies requiring the subjects to find their personal data using this system. From examination of the user activity log and a post-task questionnaire, we found that although our designed features, which support or utilize episodic context or autobiographical memory, were not used as frequently as we expected, they did improve the effectiveness of the refinding tasks