The experimental work conducted in the frames of this thesis entailed significant ethical implications, as it tested interventions with (healthy) human subjects, it investigated the effects of memory augmentations on participants’ ability to recall
1https://uc.inf.usi.ch(all URLs current as of May 14, 2018). 2http://recall-fet.eu
11 1.5 Ethics
a past experience or prior knowledge, and it involved the collection of personal
and identifiable data. As such, our experimental protocols and study designs have been reviewed by an assigned ethical board, assessing the adequateness of the employed methods and techniques before and for each experiment and/or study we have conducted in this work. In the following sections, we briefly describe how we adhered to established sound ethical practices[140].
1.5.1
Human Subject Experiments
Research on human subjects should follow established research ethics princi- ples for physically and mentally protecting participants in research experiments, as stated for the first time the Nuremberg Code3 (1947), subsequently in the Declaration of Helsinki (1964, revised in 1975, in 1996, and in 2000), and in the Belmont Report4 (1974) [4]. Clearly, the initial research ethics principles
have been amended over the years for keeping up with scientific and societal progress. Apart from ensuring at all times the safety of participants, perhaps the most notable ethical requirements are those of informed consent and devotion to research that benefits society.
The research work described in this thesis involved experiments on healthy human subjects with the main objective to augment their (episodic and seman- tic) memory via technology. These included both lab experiments, in-situ and in-the-wild experiments, and they concerned both behavioural testing and us- ability testing. Behavioural testing, in the context of this endeavour, included experimental work on the ability of subjects to recall past experiences and prior knowledge. These experiments contrasted the amplified recall capabilities of experimental participants, who used the proposed interventions, with control participants who did not. Not only have experimental tasks and experimental stimuli been employed in recall tests, but participants have been asked to fill in self-report questionnaires that surveyed their habits, preferences and evalu- ation of the employed memory intervention, as a recall augmentation to their own recall capacities. Testing involved the use of technologies we use daily (i.e., smartphones and smart watches), plus non-invasive physiological sensing de- vices, such as eye-trackers, and physiological responses measuring wristbands.
Usability tests validated the usability and utility of the employed experimen- tal interventions. Participants have been asked to perform a set of tasks and fill in self-report questionnaires, or answer interview questions. Task performance
3https://history.nih.gov/research/downloads/nuremberg.pdf
4https://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/regulations-and-policy/belmont-report/read-the-
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(e.g., recall scores, completion times and rates), and experience sampling inputs (e.g., emotion self-assessment) have been recorded for further analysis. In all hu- man subject experiments conducted in the frames of this work, the utmost care has been taken in maintaining personal integrity (i.e., appropriate use of equip- ment, information, consent, benefits and risks, anonymity, options for opting out and data, protection), and safety.
1.5.2
The Effect of Memory Experiments
It is probable that the memory experiments conducted in the frames of this work may at times have had no effect, or even a temporary detrimental effect on par- ticipants’ memory recall capacity, instead of an anticipated memory recall aug- mentation. For example, a popular user study scenario in our applied experi- mental methodology required participants to perform a recall task, after their recall capacity had been amplified by being exposed to an experimental memory intervention. In the first stages of this work, our memory interventions were not particularly successful, due to selecting suboptimal or irrelevant memory cues for augmenting one’s memory recall. As a result, participants received little, if any, memory augmentation benefit, and when repeatedly asked to recall the specifics of the a past recollection undergoing a so-called augmentation, may have felt distress or fatigue. In the subsequent stages of this work, our interven- tions became gradually more effective in assisting one’s recall of a past experi- ence and prior knowledge. In turn, we expect that this has significantly affected our participants’ recall ability in amplifying specific memories in the innate cost of attenuating other related ones (see "retrieval-induced forgetting effect" [1]). However, prior work has shown that forgetting is a rather natural and neces- sary process during the time memory consolidation processes take place [201]. Since most of our experiments took place outside a typical Psychology lab and involved participants in their daily whereabouts, we were thus unable to quantify forgetting of other related memories as a collateral effect of our targeted memory augmentation interventions. We expect though that "collateral forgetting" could be reversed simply by re-targeting those attenuated memories and applying the same memory augmentation approach that this work introduces5. To this end,
it could be argued that a memory augmentation intervention may in fact have been too coarse in the first stages of this work, or temporarily causing the atten- uation of related but non-targeted memories, but under no circumstances could be potentially "harmful".