New publication:Embodied and distributed contexts of collaborative remembering

Bietti, L.M. (2014). Embodied and distributed contexts of collaborative remembering. In C. Müller, E. Fricke, S. Ladewig, A. Cienki, D. McNeill, & S. Teßendorf (eds.), Handbook Body – Language – Communication. Volume 2. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 2008-2016.


Abstract: This chapter provides an embodied and distributed perspective into the ways in which contexts influence collaborative remembering in small groups in everyday environments. This new approach aims to provide the general grounds for a new ecologically valid theory on the study of context in collaborative remembering which accounts for the mutual interdependencies between minds, bodies and environments guiding joint remembering processes in real-world activities.

Discursive Remembering: Individual and Collective Remembering as a Discursive, Cognitive and Historical Process

If you want to order your copy (or ask your university library to do it) please visit De Gruyter or Amazon 

New publication: Multimodal alignment during collaborative remembering

Cienki, A., Bietti, L & Kok, K. (2014). Multimodal alignment during collaborative remembering. Memory Studies, 7 (3), 354-369. 

Abstract: This article investigates the roles that interactive alignment of manual gesture, postural sway, and eye-gaze play in small groups engaged in collaborative remembering. Qualitative analyses of a video corpus demonstrate that the coordination of these behaviors may contribute to joint remembering in various ways, depending upon the cognitive and communicative affordances of these behaviors. The observation that these behaviors are different in their nature and their contributory potential to shared remembering is corroborated by the results of a quantitative analysis, which suggests that co-speech gesture, postural sway, and eye-gaze have different interactional dynamics. This supports the conclusion that in order to understand the role of multimodal alignment in the discourse of shared remembering, co-verbal behavior should not be treated as a homogeneous category. Finally, we discuss the potential of combined qualitative–quantitative approaches to inform the interplay of verbal and bodily coordination during interactive memory construction.

New publication: Contextualizing human memory

Bietti, L.M., Stone, C. B. & Hirst, W. (2014). Contextualizing human memory. Memory Studies, 7 (3), 267-271. [Introduction to Special issue: Remembering in Context]

The article begins: “While research methodologies across the social sciences may differ, those social scientists inter- ested in remembering in the “real world” agree that such remembrances occur in particular contexts and that these contexts have profound influences on how the past is remembered. Moreover, if human cognitive activity is the result of contextualized interactions with culturally and historically organized material and social environments (Huchins, 2010), then an explicit description of these contexts is essential toward understanding when and how individuals and groups remember the past at any particular moment (see, for example, the work by the psycholo- gist, Endel Tulving on the encoding specificity principle, Tulving and Thomson, 1973; see also Surprenant and Neath, 2009).This Special Issue integrates cutting-edge research from memory scholars across disparate dis- ciplines who, in general, have remained largely ignorant of each others’ research. Thus, a central goal of this Special Issue is to explicitly examine how…”

New publication: Remembering in Context (Special issue, Memory Studies)

Our special issue 'Remembering in Context' just come out in Memory Studies:

See full table of contents here
Free access to the editorial here
We hope you will enjoy it as much as we did while putting it together! 

New publication: Discursive Remembering: individual and collective remembering as a discursive, cognitive and historical process (De Gruyter)

More details coming soon

If you want to pre-order your copy, please visit De Gruyter or Amazon 

Coordination, Collaboration and Cooperation: An interdisciplinary workshop

An Interdisciplinary Workshop 

Convenors: Federica Amici (MPI-EVA, Leipzig) and Lucas Bietti (Telecom ParisTech)

January 30 - 31, 2014

Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

Deutscher Platz 6

Leipzig

The aim of this workshop is to provide a better integration of our understanding of the automatic processes driving coordination mechanisms with the particular social contexts in which those processes unfold. Furthermore, we will play particular attention to the benefits that the coordination of multiple behavioral channels in social and human-robot interactions may give by fostering cooperative behavior, improving problem-solving and decision-making as well as shaping collaborative processes in social learning, in non-human primates, humans and socially intelligent robots. 

To check the final program, please take a look at the workshop website: www.cccworkshop.org

New project: Effects of Joint and Multimodal Remembering on Collaborative Learning (DistributedLearning)

Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship for Career Development (2013-2015)
Funding: European Commission, FP7
Host institute: Telecom ParisTech | Department of Economic and Social Sciences 

In collaboration with Michael Baker (Telecom ParisTech)


Abstract

Often remembering in learning activities is supported by the social and material environment in which the specific activities unfold. Hence, by paying particular attention to role of joint remembering in multimodal interactions in relation to educational and work environments, the general aims of this project are: i) to examine how collaborative learning is grounded in successful joint remembering processes; and ii) to explore the central role the integration of linguistic, embodied, social and material resources play in collaborative learning activities, by transforming them into distributed practices across space and time. 

New publication: Reminders as Interactive and Embodied Tools for Socially Distributed and Situated Remembering

Bietti, L.M. (2013). Reminders as interactive and embodied tools for socially distributed and situated remembering. SAGE Open 3: 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.

New publication: Embodied reminders in family interactions

Bietti, L.M. & Galiana Castelló, F. (2013). Embodied reminders in family interactions: Multimodal collaboration in remembering activities. Discourse Studies 15 (5) doi: 10.1177/1461445613490010 [Online before print]

Abstract: The aim of our study is to show the ways in which family members coordinate their minds, bodies and language in a functional and goal-oriented manner when they are jointly remembering shared events that they had experienced together as a group. So far, little attention has been paid to the influence that the interplay of multiple behavioral channels have in collaborative remembering in small groups. Our goal is to specifically examine the central role that direct questions have when they act as embodied reminders through the interanimation of multiple behavioral channels (language, pointing, eye-gaze, etc.) in family interactions. The video data for analysis comes from an ongoing project on how collaborative remembering takes places among small groups of Argentinean Spanish speakers as each group recalls a vacation taken together several years ago.