Shared Representations: A Peek into the Collaborative Memory Toolbox

Basic data for this project

Description

Memory often operates in and through social activities. In their daily lives people frequently collaborate to recall sharedexperiences. However, most cognitive research has ignored the social nature of memory and the distinctive mechanisms underlyingcollaborative memory processes .The proposed research program situates memory processes in the context of interpersonal and intragroup activities. From the bodyof findings on social memory that has recently accumulated we will focus on two key phenomena: a) effects of socially shared encoding on individual memory and b) group collaboration in memory tasks. We choose these two forms because they are well suited for examining the interplay of social and cognitive processes (basic science issue). Furthermore,they involve social activities that are common in real social groups like families, friends or teamwork situations (applied relevance). Information is better remembered when jointly encoded with similar (vs. dissimilar) others. Although the effect is robust, weknow little about the underlying processes. Task 1 examines for the first time proposed cognitive mechanisms: Stimulithat are experienced together with relevant others receive more attention and elaboration, increasing their accessibility. Exp. 1 tests whether enhanced attention drives the effect. Exp. 2 examines the greater elaboration of jointly encoded stimuli with animplicit memory test.But why would people attend to or elaborate co-experienced stimuli? Task 2 draws on a motivated cognition approach bywhich cognitive processes are harnessed to fulfill our goals in a given social context. Thus, the accessibility of information inmemory depends on, inter alia, its value in achieving social goals such as affiliation or shared reality creation. We predict that the shared encoding effect depends on the strength of participants’ affiliative motivation. Exp. 1 manipulates socialexclusion, experienced before the joint encoding, to create the need to restore relational needs. We predict a stronger sharedencoding effect after exclusion (vs. inclusion). Exp. 2 further tests this account: After joint encoding participants will be excluded(vs. included) by the same co-participants. Because participants in this condition do not desire/ expect a friendly social connectionwith the co-participants, the memory effect should be reduced.Memory impairments are recurrently observed in collaborative groups when compared to nominal groups (collaborative inhibition). This occurs because the ongoing interactions with others continuously provide retrieval cues that often conflict with theones individuals use to represent and recall information (retrieval strategy disruption).One innovative argument advanced in this proposal is that collaborative inhibition normally found in groups of strangers, can beseen as reflecting an early stage of a shared representation and not necessarily as a permanent cognitive handicap. In recent teststo the strategy disruption hypothesis we found that when individual impressions are formed in conditions thatpromote similar representations across participants, collaborative inhibition fails to emerge. That is, whenparticipants in collaboration attain converging cognitive representations, the negative consequences of collaborative recalldisappear.Tasks 3 & 4 use a new paradigm examining the effects of manipulating representations formed at encoding on a cued recall task.We predict that those who anticipate collaboration in a subsequent memory task will avoid idiosyncratic representations and developmore consensual encoding organizations (measured by the degree of convergence of the produced cues). Importantly, we expectthat when the actual memory task mismatches what was anticipated, both individual and group recall are impaired. We will alsoinvestigate how converging cognitive representations are attained as collaborative groups learn how to collaborate. Finally, sinceelaboration benefits recall performance, we will use it as an outlet to study distributed memory: i.e., whether elaborative effortsmade by one group member can enhance memory of other group members (Task 5). We will also explore the boundary conditionsfor distributed memory namely by examining how task compatibility between group members and collaborative goals mediate itsemergence.This project is likely to bring important scientific and applied contributions. The track record of the team in this field and theinnovativeness of the ideas and paradigms advanced will bring novel contributions for understanding collaborative memoryprocesses. The dissemination of these findings may enhance the awareness about the costs and benefits of memory collaborationand inform the successful accomplishment of collaborative group tasks in the most diverse applied contexts.