Abstract
In two studies, we examined Chinese students’ memory for the names of the leaders of China. In Study 1, subjects were cued with the names of periods from China’s history. Subjects listed as many leaders as possible from each period and put them in the correct ordinal position when they could (see Roediger and DeSoto, 2014). Results showed that within each period, a primacy effect and sometimes a recency effect emerged. Moreover, the average recall probability for leaders within a specific period was a function of the ordinal position of the period. In Study 2, we asked another group of subjects to identify the sources through which they were able to recall each leader. We found that most subjects remembered leaders due to class and coursework. We also found a relation between a leader’s recall probability and the amount of information available on that leader on the Internet. Our findings further imply that the serial position function captures the form of collective memory.
Highlights
The study of collective memory, defined as a form of memory that is shared by a large group of people and that represents the group’s identity (Hirst and Manier, 2008; Wertsch and Roediger, 2008; Roediger and Abel, 2015), was initiated by the French sociologist Halbwachs (1992) in the 1920s
We clarified in the questionnaire that the national leaders we referred to were the emperors of feudal dynasties and the presidents of the Republic of China (ROC) and People’s Republic of China (PRC)
In China’s different historical periods, some leaders recalled with notably high probabilities were not among the earliest national leaders in their corresponding periods
Summary
The study of collective memory, defined as a form of memory that is shared by a large group of people and that represents the group’s identity (Hirst and Manier, 2008; Wertsch and Roediger, 2008; Roediger and Abel, 2015), was initiated by the French sociologist Halbwachs (1992) in the 1920s. Most have studied collective memory through the use of humanistic and qualitative research methods. Psychologists have begun to apply quantitative and statistical techniques to probe collective memory (e.g., Overstreet and Healy, 2011; Kelley et al, 2013, 2015; Rubin, 2014; Zaromb et al, 2014; Roediger and DeSoto, in press). The studies reported in this burgeoning literature have begun to reveal knowledge about the psychological mechanisms underlying collective memory. One major finding of these studies is the existence of the serial position effect for ordered list items in collective memory
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