Indexical Memory
A longitudinal shift of the remembering function from retaining content itself toward retaining where and how the content can be retrieved through AI, reflecting a change in how a person manages personal knowledge under sustained AI use.
Operational Definition
TREND. Tracked over repeated measurements as the change in the balance between content recall and retrieval-path recall: at each timepoint, record the share of queried items for which the person recalls the substantive content versus only the location/route to retrieve it; the trend is the change in that share across the observation window.
Measurement Schema
Proposed measurement protocol (not yet empirically validated): Repeated cued-recall protocol: at multiple timepoints, probe a fixed item set and classify each response as content-recall vs. location/route-recall; track the location-recall proportion over time as the longitudinal index; report the trajectory (e.g., slope across sessions) rather than a single-session count.