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…”