How Cognition Shapes Collective Memory

Whether studying for exams, remembering a family vacation, or recalling important public events, we remember the past with others. Despite the ubiquity of social remembering, research on human memory has focused on people performing memory tasks alone. This approach has uncovered many principles of individual cognition, but it cannot explain the interplay of cognitive processes involved in group remembering. Rajaram and her research team study group remembering and the dynamic reciprocity between the collective and the individual. This work has led to an integrative framework to capture the different cognitive mechanisms that come into action during collaborative remembering and cannot be inferred from examining individual performance alone. This integrative approach allows experimental tests of social influences on both accurate memory and memory errors, and it identifies the confluence of specific cognitive processes that give rise to collective memory. Rajaram will discuss experimental studies by her research group on these questions about social memory.