Reminders as Interactive and Embodied Tools for Socially Distributed and Situated Remembering

Lucas M Bietti

doi:10.1177/2158244013501331

Abstract

Current approaches to socially distributed remembering maintain that remembering is a fluid action coordinating minds, bodies, and the physical and the social world to accomplish particular goals. That is, the act of remembering is always an active reconstruction of the past in the present. How this act of remembering unfolds is highly dynamic and malleable and is contingent on the means by which the recollection is communicated and the social and material environments in which these processes unfold. These communicative acts of remembering are always embodied, multimodal, and interactive. However, so far, little attention has been paid to the influence that the interplay of multiple behavioral channels have in collaborative remembering in small groups. The aim of this exploratory study is to demonstrate the central role that questions have as embodied and interactive tools for collaborative remembering in two small group multimodal interactions in natural settings. This study suggests that questions acting as a reminder in multimodal activities of collaborative remembering foster the formation of specific types of interactional sequences with their own temporal dynamics.

Highlights

Often collaborative remembering in everyday environments is supported by the social and material environment in which the specific activity unfolds (Sutton, Harris, Keil, & Barnier, 2010)
Little attention has been paid to the influence that the interplay of multiple behavioral channels have in collaborative remembering in small groups
The quantitative analysis has indicated that a significant percentage of the total number of questions formulated in both sessions made a pragmatic contribution: They played the role of reminders in the multimodal interactions between friends and family members

Summary

Introduction

Often collaborative remembering in everyday environments (e.g., around the dinner table) is supported by the social and material environment in which the specific activity unfolds (Sutton, Harris, Keil, & Barnier, 2010). Reminders function to facilitate the reconstruction of shared past experiences among members of groups by means of collaborative facilitation mechanisms (Harris et al, 2011) They may act as interactive communicative devices that trigger the generation of “new” memories. In relation to cases of dialogic syntax, several studies on naturally occurring interaction in conversation analysis (Ford, Fox, & Thompson, 2002; Lerner, 1991, 2004; Sacks et al, 1974) as well as in experimental settings in psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology (Allen, Haywood, Rajendran, & Branigan, 2011; Fusaroli et al, 2012) have shown the ways in which interlocutors collaboratively and cooperatively co-construct utterances in conversations This phenomenon may occur by repeating and reusing each others’ lexical items and syntactic structures and/or latching onto the other person’s turn and completing it without pausing. In indirect questions the interrogative tone disappears, as does the question mark in writing (Gili Gaya, 1961)

Participants

Procedure and Data Collection

Discussion