Capturing life as it is lived is an important goal in psychology, and diary methods are commonly used for this purpose. They capture events near the time of their occurrence and are less prone to retrospective biases associated with questionnaire, interview and survey methods. However, participants in diary studies must remember to carry the diary with them, and find it convenient to make entries in timely fashion. New approaches, replacing paper diaries with technology (e.g. personal digital assistants), can overcome forgetting to make entries and retrospective filling of data. However, until recently technology had its own problems (e.g. unreliability and cost of devices, the need for training, biases of technical competence, etc.). The research described in this dissertation arose from the anticipation that the rapid, worldwide growth of smartphone ownership would overcome many of these limitations since participant-owned smartphone diaries can eliminate associated costs and facilitate increased rates of compliance. Six diary studies were conducted on two transient cognitive phenomena. Initially, a smartphone app was developed and compared with a paper diary in the study of involuntary autobiographical memories. Although participants in the smartphone-diary condition demonstrated significantly better compliance than those in the paper-diary condition by reliably carrying their smartphones, and promptly completing diary entries in the app, they recorded significantly fewer events than paper diary users. To test that this unexpected finding was not specific to involuntary autobiographical memories, the method was tested with everyday memory failures, and the same unexpected finding was obtained. Further studies manipulated the length of diary-keeping period and demonstrated a diary entry rate reduction effect with longer diary keeping periods, an effect seen in both paper- and participant-owned smartphone-diaries. For involuntary autobiographical memories, the effect was demonstrated by comparing 1-day and 7-day diaries, and also by using a 30-40 minutelong digital audio recording method. With everyday memory failures, the effect was demonstrated by comparing 7-day and 28-day diaries. The audio recording method was used to capture involuntary autobiographical memories while driving. It was also used on a campus walk and compared with a 1-day paper diary within-subjects, finding a higher rate of recording in the shorter period, and consistency of memory counts across two modes of recording. This novel audio-recording method facilitated much more detailed analysis of involuntary memory cues and chaining and enabled the evaluation of potential instances of priming. Finally, a telephone and postal-based diary study of everyday memory failures demonstrated the feasibility of recruitment and measurement of participants remotely, which can be particularly useful with older adults. Taken together, the results of this research make a significant methodological contribution to research on transient everyday cognitive phenomena by showing that (1) care is needed when using participant-owned smartphone diaries, (2) paper diaries may be more reliable than currently given credit, and (3) diary-recording periods can be substantially reduced without compromising the quantity and the quality of data obtained. In addition, results increase our theoretical understanding of two specific phenomena studied in this dissertation: involuntary autobiographical memories and everyday memory failures. The findings indicate that involuntary memories are much more frequent than previously thought, may represent a stable characteristic of a person and, in addition to immediately present cues, can be elicited by internal memory chaining process and more distant priming of events and thoughts. Finally, the absence of age effects in the frequency and nature of recorded everyday memory failures, together with significant negative age effects in laboratory tests of memory and cognition, is a novel finding that has significant implications for research on cognitive ageing.

This research was designed to explore autobiographical memory in children, specifically, the personal events involved in memory and memory failures and to what extent children and adults realize what they have forgotten. Since previous research in this domain has focused mainly on adult's or children's ability to recall past events, few have ventured to investigate what underlies the process of forgetting for everyday events in parents and children, and if a link exists between the two. Survey data pertaining to self-reported memory failures along with information on the amount of interaction between parents and children was collected from parents and children at a local elementary school. The results showed that children and parents were more likely to report failure in prospective memory (forgetting to do something) than retrospective memory (forgetting something they already knew). Additionally, when asked what they thought had caused the failure, children were more likely to attribute the lapse to external distractions. Finally, the data showed that the degree of parent-child interaction was significantly related to the detail provided in a child's reported memory failures. The results are discussed in the context of developing a better understanding of, and suggest future avenues for, research in memory and memory failures in children, as well as understanding the relation between parent/child memory.

A ce jour, nous savons peu de choses sur la manière dont la mémoire épisodique quotidienne, visuellement riche et complexe en termes d’éléments contextuels, est affectée par le vieillissement normal contrairement aux connaissances acquises dans le domaine du vieillissement sur la mémoire épisodique verbale ou visuelle au moyens des tests traditionnels ou des procédures de laboratoire comme le paradigme de rappel libres multi-essais (e.g., utilisé par le California Verbal Learning Test). La présente thèse s’est par conséquent attachée à implémenter ce paradigme traditionnel de rappels libres multi-essais d’évaluation de la mémoire épisodique au sein d’un dispositif RV simulant une visite dans un appartement, le HOMES test (Human Objet Memory of Everyday Scenes test). Cette procédure permet de dériver des indices d’apprentissage, de catégorisation, d’interférence proactive, de bénéfice de la reconnaissance comparée au rappel libre, et de fausses reconnaissances. A cela, nous nous sommes intéressés aux relations entre la mémoire quotidienne et l’action à travers l’effet denavigation active.A l’aide d’études comparatives, nous avons retrouvé le profil mnésique classiquement observé avec le test « papier-crayon », excepté pour l’interférence proactive qui n’est pas observée comme augmentée chez les participants âgés. En effet, des scores de rappel réduits,un bénéfice accru de la reconnaissance, une sensibilité augmentée aux fausses reconnaissances, et des capacités de regroupements sémantiques sont obtenus. Chez les jeunes adultes avec traumatisme crânien (étude 1), un profil identique est observé alors qu’un profil bien différent est obtenu auprès des patients avec maladie Alzheimer (étude 2) avec notamment un tableau associant des déficits plus marqués et des capacités de catégorisation altérées. Les études 3 et 4 adressant l’effet de navigation active chez le sujet jeune et âgé, ont mis en évidence un effet bénéfique de la navigation active sur la reconnaissance chez les deux groupes de sujets. Par contre, la navigation active diminuait les fausses reconnaissances des jeunes mais augmentait celles des âgés. Nous discutons les résultats de ces études sur la mémoire quotidienne à travers les hypothèses de déficit-item spécifique et du déclin fronto-exécutif du vieillissement normal. / To this day, very little is known about the way aging affects everyday episodic memory, which is a visually and contextually rich and complex memory. However, episodic memory is traditionally assessed using verbal tasks which are lacking such complexity. One of them, the California Verbal Learning Test (CVLT) uses the multi-trial free recall paradigm that we also implemented in the Human Object Memory of Everyday Scenes test using virtual reality to simulate a visit in an apartment (the HOMES test).This procedure allowed us to assess multiple memory processes such as learning, semantic clustering, proactive interference, recall versus recognition, and false recognitions. We also wanted to investigate the relationship between everyday memory and action through active navigation and its effects on each of these processes. We showed the typical profile of older adults usually obsereved using traditional paper-pencil tests on most of the memory indices except for proactive interference, which was not increased. In fact, older adults showed a reduced free recall performance despite a preserved learning ability across trials, a benefit from recognition but also a higher susceptibility to false recognitions. TBI patients (study 1) showed a profile similar to that of older adults, but patients with Alzheimer disease were impaired on all of the HOMES indices (study 2). Studies 3 and 4 examined the beneficial effect of active navigation in younger and older adults’ everyday memory and showed that that recognition was the measure that benefited the most in both age groups. In contrast, older adults while active navigation decreased false recognitions in younger adults, it actually increased false recognitions in older adults. Our results on everyday memory are discussed in terms of item-specific deficit and executive deficit hypotheses in normal aging.