The Fallacy of an Airtight Alibi: Understanding Human Memory for Where Using Experience Sampling

A primary challenge for alibi-generation research is establishing the ground truth of real-world events of interest. In the current study, we used a smartphone app to record data on adult participants (N = 51) for a month prior to a memory test. The app captured accelerometry data, GPS locations, and audio environments every 10 min. After a week-long retention interval, we asked participants to identify where they were at a given time from among four alternatives. Participants were incorrect 36% of the time. Furthermore, our forced-choice procedure allowed us to conduct a conditional logit analysis to assess the different aspects of the events that the participants experienced and their relative importance to the decision process. We found strong evidence that participants confuse days across weeks. In addition, people often confused weeks in general and also hours across days. Similarity of location induced more errors than similarity of audio environments or movement types.

Automated summary

An important challenge in alibi-generation research is establishing the truth of real-world events of interest. This study used a smartphone app to track adult participants and found that participants often made mistakes in identifying their locations. The research also revealed that participants tend to confuse days across weeks and hours across days, with location similarity leading to more errors than audio environment or movement type similarity.