Memory-Driven Self-Disclosure and Relational Turning Points: A Longitudinal Multimodal Study of Human-AI Interaction
For researchers and designers of conversational AI, this work provides empirical evidence that human-AI relationships develop through both gradual accumulation and abrupt turning points, offering insights for designing more engaging and persistent AI companions.
This study investigates how repeated interactions with a memory-augmented conversational AI build relationships, finding that perceived memory shapes later enjoyment indirectly through self-disclosure, and that relationships are punctuated by discrete turning points (crashes and surges) with different behavioral detectability and persistence patterns.
As conversational AI systems are designed for repeated use, a central question is how a series of interactions becomes a relationship. We present a longitudinal multimodal study of a memory-augmented conversational agent (24 participants x 10 sessions), in which participants rated five relational constructs -- familiarity, self-disclosure, perceived memory, conversational quality, and enjoyment -- after each session. Two complementary dynamics emerge. First, conversational quality strongly shapes how enjoyable a session feels in the moment but does not carry forward across sessions, whereas perceived memory is relationally conditioned -- predicted by prior relational state rather than reflecting system capability alone -- and it shapes later enjoyment indirectly, via subsequent self-disclosure. Second, relationships are punctuated by discrete turning points -- crashes and surges -- that are partially traceable in multimodal behavior and open different intervention windows: surges are more behaviorally detectable in the moment, enjoyment surges persist more reliably than enjoyment crashes recover, and some crashes are better forecast from person-specific behavioral drift than detected after they have already occurred. Together, the findings suggest that longitudinal human-AI relationships are built through both slow accumulation and abrupt turning points.