Snap Back to Reality: Comparing Real-World Spatial Memory in the "Wild" vs. in the Lab

Memory is most commonly studied using lab-based measures; however, spatial memory for large-scale environments, such as cities, typically takes extended time and motivation to learn, thus raising questions about the ecological validity of findings from traditional lab-based paradigms (e.g., information that is learned over a short timescale and with no real-world relevance). We leveraged technological breakthroughs to create a custom smartphone application to compare situated spatial memory with lab-based measures. Specifically, we compared performance in healthy young adults across two established lab-based tasks, judgments of relative direction (JRD) and map drawing, and our novel app-base