Collaborative Memory: A Selective Review of Data and Theory

As social beings, people intuitively value shared reminiscing. One reason for this seems to be the need for social bonding, and another has to do with the common belief that it improves memory. To understand shared remembering from a memory standpoint, we discuss the cognitive experimental research on the process and the consequences of collaborative remembering. Interest in the experimental investigations of social memory can be traced back to the traditions of Hermann Ebbinghaus and Frederic Bartlett, traditions that have heavily influenced our own approach to investigating these questions in the laboratory. In this chapter, we present the modal collaborative memory paradigm that has enabled an impressive array of experimental studies and a descriptive framework that our group has developed to organize several key mechanisms that come into play when individuals remember together. We discuss cognitive processes that are activated through collaborative recall, such as forgetting or rebounding of memory, social contagion of true memories (or reexposure) as well as false memories, pruning of memory errors, cross-cueing during collaboration, and the power of retrieval during collaboration. We also discuss how these processes shape collaborative recall, and some experimental manipulations that influence the operations of these cognitive processes. In describing these influences of collaboration on memory, we also outline some antecedent cognitive conditions that shape collaboration as well as several postcollaborative phenomena that result from collaborative recall. The collaborative memory movement in memory research provides experimental tools to study questions on the social transmission of memory, the memory reconstruction process for individuals who engage in collaboration, and the emergence of collective memory for groups as a whole.