Enhancing Episodic Memory Recall Through Nostalgic Image Generation and Interactive Modification

An opportunity for reflection while expressing memories of one’s own experiences can lead an individual to contemplate the daily life events they experience. However, we get limited opportunities to recollect our memories in daily life. Therefore, we considered that approaching memory scenes through pictures and artworks related to memories might trigger a chain of recall of memory details and related episodes. In this paper, we propose a nostalgic image generation system with an interactive modification function to support users’ nostalgic episodic memory recall scenes in daily life. The proposed system supports nostalgic memory recall in two aspects: verbalizing a memory while viewing an image and modifying the image generated to make it closely resemble the memory. The results of the verification experiment suggest that verbalizing nostalgic memory as an interactive modification and modifying the generated image may support memory recall when imaging nostalgic memory.