Collaborative Memory Research Articles

Remembering and retelling stories in individual and collaborative contexts

Collaborative cognition, in which two or more people work together on a cognitive task, may be typical of everyday life, and may even represent an important aspect of everyday cognitive adaptation for older adults. We examined collaborative memory for stories by comparing younger (n = 64) older (n = 66) individuals and dyads with collaborative performance produced by married spouses and stranger dyads. Overall, across four collaborative recall products (two positive and two negative performance indicators), some evidence for our hypothesis of general or selective collaborative effectiveness was observed. Moreover, such evidence was obtained at both an immediate and delayed recall episode. Discussion includes applications, limitations and suggestions for future research.

Negotiating the university research culture: collaborative voices of new academics

This paper contributes to the wider discussion of the collaborative research process and the situation of new academics in the early stages of their research careers. It draws on our lived experience through several collaborative research projects and is descriptive and autobiographical in nature. As such, it provides an opportunity for our voices as female academics to be heard in a different way. We suggest that collaborative research can both enhance research skills and empower early career researchers (particularly female academics). Further, we reassert the importance of collaborative research at a time when higher education policy has tended to encourage individualism and competition between researchers. As a methodology to reflect purposefully on our lived experience as co‐researchers, we have used a qualitative design based on collaborative memory work. From the evidence presented in our stories, we have made some suggestions for developing successful collaborative research partnerships, both for individuals and institutions.

Order effects in collaborative memory contamination? Comment on Gabbert, Memon, and Wright (2006)

Gabbert, Memon, and Wright (2006) claimed evidence of an order effect in collaborative memory contamination, in which the collaborator who first spoke of a particular detail was more influential. The Gabbert et al. findings are ambiguous in this regard, because their analyses collapsed across (1) cases in which both collaborators reported the detail they had witnessed and (2) cases in which only one of the collaborators mentioned the detail s/he had mentioned. The latter cases do not evidence an order effect per se.

Relationship between masculinity‐femininity and concession in an experimental collaborative eyewitness testimony

The present study examined the relationships of masculinity and femininity with concession in an experimental collaborative eyewitness testimony task, using the MORI technique. Participants formed same sex or mixed sex pairs and watched a videotaped event. Their eyewitness memories were assessed three times: immediately after watching, after discussing the event together, and individually 1 week later. The participants’ self‐confidence in their recalled memories and percentages of concessions were also examined. The Masculinity‐Humanity‐Femininity Scale was administered to the participants at the end of the experiment. The results showed that masculinity negatively correlated with concession, and that both masculinity and femininity were associated with inaccuracy in collaborative memory recall.

Storing and restoring visual input with collaborative rank coding and associative memory

Associative memory in cortical circuits has been held as a major mechanism for content-addressable memory. Hebbian synapses implement associative memory efficiently when storing sparse binary activity patterns. However, in models of sensory processing, representations are graded and not binary. Thus, it has been an unresolved question how sensory computation could exploit cortical associative memory. Here we propose a way how sensory processing could benefit from memory in cortical circuitry. We describe a new collaborative method of rank coding for converting graded stimuli, such as natural images, into sequences of synchronous spike volleys. Such sequences of sparse binary patterns can be efficiently processed in associative memory of the Willshaw type. We evaluate storage capacity and noise tolerance of the proposed system and demonstrate its use in cleanup and fill-in for noisy or occluded visual input.

Compensating strategies in collaborative remembering in very old couples

This study investigates collaborative memory performance in very old married couples working in two types of participant constellations, and with two types of memory tasks, i.e. working as couples, or as individuals in episodic or semantic memory tasks. Sixty-two old married couples were a priori classified as high or low on two dimensions suggested to be important for successful collaboration, i.e. responsibility (how division of responsibility was organized) and agreement (how they mutually agreed on each other's view). The episodic memory task was immediate recall of short stories. The semantic memory tasks were to answer questions about names, places, and concepts. The results suggested that: (1) groups outperformed a single individual, but (2) groups in general suffered from collaboration relative to the predicted potential in episodic tasks only, thus replicating earlier results. Nevertheless, (3) the couples scoring high on division of responsibility achieved the same productivity as nominal pairs (i.e. the predicted potential); (4) the couples scoring high on the agreement dimension showed that they were not as affected by collaboration, but then performed less well in "absolute" performance. Finally, the results were discussed in terms of optimal compensation strategies, especially for elderly couples.

Net effect of memory collaboration: how is collaboration affected by factors such as friendship, gender and age?

The purpose of the study was to investigate explicit spatial and verbal collaborative memory performance. Factors such as friendship, age and gender were chosen for ecological and theoretical reasons. In Experiment 1 friendship and age were studied. The task was to retrieve the location of 25 pictures, which were presented in a 5 x 5-matrix grid. All participants retrieved once individually and once dyadically. Dyads were compared to the predicted base line, i.e., the pooled score from two participants working on their own (the same participants as in the dyad). Based on cognitive development aspects and collaboration data, it was predicted that the young collaborating dyads would not be able to reduce the net negative effects of collaboration to the same extent as older dyads. The findings revealed that, (1) dyadic collaboration affected spatial memory performance negatively, i.e., net negative effects of collaboration; (2) older (15-years-old), as opposed to young (7-years-old) dyads, reduced the net negative effects of collaboration and; (3) friend dyads, regardless of age, were able to reduce the net negative effect. In experiment 2, gender differences were studied in two explicit memory tasks. The purpose was to investigate if earlier findings of collaboration can be generalised to another ecological aspect of group composition, i.e., gender. Gender differences were studied at individual and group level. The results suggest that gender related memory differences exist on an individual and dyadic level in terms of absolute scores. Women remember explicit memory tasks to a greater degree than men. No main effect was found for gender in collaboration, i.e., both genders suffered compared to predicted potential.

Why do electronic conversations seem less polite? the costs and benefits of hedging

Electronic conversations often seem less polite than spoken conversations. The usual explanation for this is that people who are not physically copresent become depersonalized and less inhibited by social norms. While this explanation is intuitively appealing, we consider another possibility, based on the costs of producing "polite" utterances when speaking versus when typing. We examined a corpus of conversations generated by 26 three-person groups who interacted either face-to-face or electronically to do a collaborative memory task. We coded hedges (which mark an utterance as provisional) and questions (which display doubt or invite input from others), as people presented their own recollections, accepted, modified, or rejected those of others, and tried to reach consensus. Both of these devices are associated with politeness. For most people, hedging is more difficult when typing than when speaking because additional words are required, while marking an utterance as a question is equally easy in both media. The two groups made somewhat different use of these devices: Face-to-face groups hedged more than electronic groups, but both groups used questions just as often. We discuss how these and other differences emerge from the costs and affordances of communication media.

Cued Memory Collaboration: Effects of Friendship and Type of Retrieval Cue

The effects of friendship and collaboration on memory retrieval were investigated in two experiments. The net negative effect of collaboration in memory retrieval and the effect of friendship were studied within a cueing framework. The aim of the study was to investigate the reduced cue effectiveness hypothesis. In Experiment 1, dyadic retrieval was compared to that of a nominal group (a pooled score from two individuals working individually). The task was to encode and retrieve 90 words individually or dyadically. The retrieval phase was supported by cues produced by others or produced by the participants themselves (individually or dyadically). In Experiment 2, friends were compared to non-friends in a memory retrieval phase. All participants retrieved alone in Experiment 2. The results of Experiment 1 revealed that dyadic retrieval suffered compared to nominal group retrieval and that no such discrepancies were found for retrieval with cues produced by others. In Experiment 2, friends could help each other towards successful retrieval to a greater extent than non-friends, and “for others” instructions increased retrieval performance as well. These findings replicate previous studies by Andersson and Ronnberg (1995, 1996), and advance the understanding of collaborative memory; that is, net negative effects of collaboration can be explained in terms of the reduced cue effectiveness hypothesis.

Social Remembering: Individual and Collaborative Memory for Social Information

The study of individual memory and remembering has a very long history in experimental psychology. However, it was not until recently that experimental studies systematically investigated social aspects of remembering. In particular, relatively few studies have examined remembering (a) as both an individual and group phenomenon, and (b) when the stimulus material to be recalled is a purposive social interaction. The present chapter reviews the theoretical implications of a continuing series of social remembering studies which compare individual with social (or collaborative) remembering in terms of both the quantity (accuracy and error) and the quality of what was recalled, and particular attention is paid to the relationship between accuracy and confidence. The applied implications of this research in the area of the social psychology of law are also discussed.