Special Coverage on the 2020 Invited Talk
Collaborative Remembering and Collective Memory (1)
Suparna Rajaram (Stony Brook University)
Summary by Laura Mickes, Digital Content Editor
This recap is part of a special series of session summaries from the Psychonomic Society's 61st Annual Meeting. To read the rest of the series, click here.
I’m a fan of Suparna Rajaram's (@srajaram02) research, and I'm not alone. Rajaram is one of the 2019 recipients of the Clifford T. Morgan Distinguished Leadership Award. I have to come clean at the outset of this summary: Rajaram is an inspiration to me. I'm grateful for her efforts, with Randi Martin and Judith Kroll, in starting (and running) Women in Cognitive Science 20 years ago. Their contributions have undoubtedly made my career path smoother. For all of their efforts to create gender equality, generations of cognitive scientists will benefit. That said, onto the science! How will we collectively remember the Psychonomic Society 2020 Annual Meeting? We learn together, remember together, and share information with each other. Rajaram asked, "How does collaborative remembering work?" In these types of studies, there is a study phase where all participants study information independently. Then there's a first test phase where participants recall alone or in a group of others. As shown in the screenshot below, the group usually does not remember as much as the solo test takers on this first test. Then there's a post-collaboration test phase where all participants recall on their own again. On the final test, those in the collaborative recall condition typically outperform those in the solo condition (as shown in the screenshot below).
Rajaram mentioned several forces that may account for the pattern of results. One force is that an individual's retrieval is disrupted by other people's recollections, which results in lower memory for the group overall. But then there are re-exposure gains, in which recall is boosted later because of the collaboration.
In one investigation, Rajaram and colleagues measured the impact of group configuration by manipulating group size and structure. As shown in the left figure below, participants recalled on their own, in one group, or in two groups made up of different sets of people.
Reconfiguring the group improved recall on the second recall test, as shown in the right figure above. Working together increased recall on the final test. Interestingly, repeatedly recalling with the same group members led to more forgetting of the same information. In other words, remembering together changed what was remembered.
Rajaram also mentioned her investigations of 1) the impact of collaborative recall on the content and structure of memories, and 2) whether we remember more positive memories when recalling together. The latter investigation's quick bottom line is yes; the positivity bias is greater when recalling in a group. Watch the talk to learn all about this line of her research. To return to the question I asked at the beginning of this summary, "How will we collectively remember the Psychonomic Society 2020 Annual Meeting?" Likely answer: positively!
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