Memory and imagination during the pandemic

Le Monde diplomatique has published an article I wrote in Spanish with Felipe Muller on memory and imagination during the time of COVID-19. The pandemic has made our collective memories and behaviors obsolete, so how can we imagine post COVID-19 collective life under these conditions? This is the topic of the article.

https://www.eldiplo.org/notas-web/imaginar-el-futuro/

Special issue: Remembering with Others

Remembering with Others: Conversational Dynamics and Mnemonic Outcomes

Editors: Lucas Bietti & Charles Stone

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/17568765/2019/11/4

Editors’ Introduction: Remembering With Others: Conversational Dynamics and Mnemonic Outcomes

Lucas M. Bietti & Charles B. Stone

Pages: 592-608 [OA] https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12443

Memory at the Sharp End: The Costs of Remembering With Others in Forensic Contexts

Lorraine Hope & Fiona Gabbert

Pages: 609-626.https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12357

The Mnemonic Consequences of Jurors’ Selective Retrieval During Deliberation

Alexander C. V. Jay, Charles B. Stone, Robert Meksin, Clinton Merck, Natalie S. Gordon & William Hirst

Pages: 627-643. https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12435

Communication in Theory and Research on Transactive Memory Systems: A Literature Review.

Vesa Peltokorpi & Anthony C. Hood

Pages: 644-667. https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12359

Features of Successful and Unsuccessful Collaborative Memory Conversations in Long‐Married Couples.

Celia B. Harris, Amanda J. Barnier, John Sutton & Greg Savage

Pages: 668-686.  https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12350

Social Transmission of False Memory in Small Groups and Large Networks

Raeya Maswood & Suparna Rajaram

Pages: 687-709. https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12348

Storytelling as Adaptive Collective Sensemaking  

Lucas M. Bietti, Ottilie Tilston & Adrian Bangerter

Pages: 710-732 [OA]. https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12358

Collaborative Remembering in Conversational Narration

Neal R. Norrick

Pages: 733-751.  https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12378

Functions of Parental Intergenerational Narratives Told by Young People

Natalie Merrill, Jordan A. Booker & Robyn Fivush

Pages: 752-773.  https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12356

From Conversations to Digital Communication: The Mnemonic Consequences of Consuming and Producing Information via Social Media

Charles B. Stone & Qi Wang

Pages: 774-793. https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12369

The Social Function of Autobiographical Stories in the Personal and Virtual World: An Initial Investigation

Nicole Alea, Susan Bluck, Emily L. Mroz & Zanique Edwards

Pages: 794-810. https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12370

An Evolutionary Approach to the Study of Collaborative Remembering?

Federica Amici

Pages: 811-816. https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12398

Reflections and Comments on Research on Memory and Conversation From an Ethnographic Perspective

Nils Dahlbäck, Mattias Forsblad & Lars‐Christer Hydén

Pages: 817-820. https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12399

Memory, Narrative, and the Consequences

Jens Brockmeier

Pages: 821-824. https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12412

Knowing, Remembering, and Relating to Others Online: A Commentary

Michael J. Baker & Françoise Détienne

Pages: 825-830.  https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12423

Reflections on Conversations and Memory

Travis G. Cyr & William Hirst

Pages: 831-837. https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12437

Collaborating to remember collaborative design: An exploratory study

Bietti, L.M. & Baker, M.J. (2016). Collaborating to remember collaborative design: An exploratory study. Memory Studies, 1-19. DOI: 10.1177/1750698016683438.

Abstract: We examine the ways in which members of a small group coordinate their memories, bodies and language in a functional and goal-oriented manner when they are co-designing their dream house and then collaborative remembering that previous interactive encounter. Our analyses show the following: (1) participants structured collaborative design and collaborative remembering sessions in different ways (e.g. linear and sequential vs iterative and hierarchically structured, respectively); (2) higher degrees of knowledge building were temporally synchronized with higher degrees of interactivity during both tasks; (3) collaborative remembering did not only follow the spatial structure of successive elements of the dream-house design session, but it was also proceeded by associations between semantic elements of the discourse; and (4) participants collaboratively remember better what initially generated most joint activity during collaborative design. This research thus contributes to understanding of collaborative remembering processes with respect to a knowledge-rich collaborative task.

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! 

Benefits and costs of collaboration for collective memory

In a previous volume of Current Directions in Psychological Science “Collaboration Both Hurts and Helps Memory: A Cognitive Perspective” (Vol. 20, 2011) a very interesting paper about the costs and benefits of remembering together by Suparna Rajaram (visit the website of Rajaram’s lab at Stony Brook University)

The abstract begins: “Humans spend a majority of their lives in a social context. So historically, several disciplines have pursued a study of the social aspects of memory. Yet, research on memory in cognitive psychology has, for more than a century, concentrated mainly on individuals working in isolation. A recent shift in this orientation has led to a rapid growth in cognitive research revealing both counterintuitive and complex effects of collaboration on learning and remembering. For example, despite subjective reports to the contrary, collaboration impairs a group’s recall performance compared to its potential. Yet, individual group members also show improvements in recall after collaboration. This article highlights the role of cognitive mechanisms in producing these and other benefits and costs of collaboration and in shaping both individual and collective memories.”

New paper on social and cultural functions of collective memory

In the current volume of The Review of Philosophy and Psychology (Special issue on Distributed Cognition and Memory) “The Adaptive Function of Distributed Remembering: Contributions to the Formation of Collective Memory” (Vol. 4, issue 1) a must read article for those interested in the social and cultural functions of collective memory by Martin M. Fagin, Jeremy K. Yamashiro and William C. Hirst.

The abstract begins: “Empirical research has increasingly turned its attention to distributed cogni- tion. Acts of remembering are embedded in a social, interactional context; cognitive labor is divided between a rememberer and external sources. The present article examines the benefits and costs associated with distributed, collaborative, conversational remember- ing. Further, we examine the consequences of joint acts of remembering on subsequent individual acts of remembering. Here, we focus on influences on memory through social contagion and socially shared retrieval-induced forgetting. Extending beyond a single social interaction, we consider work that tracks the propagation of socially shared retrieval-induced forgetting throughout larger networks made up of several agents. Although much work has focused on how distributing cognition can augment memory, this is not the primary lesson we draw from the conversational remembering literature. Rather, mnemonic convergence between communicators is a boon to sociality. It allows the formation and maintenance of mnemonic communities, rather than expanding capacity or accuracy of memory per se.“

Collective Memories in Wikipedia

A new PhD thesis on the formation of collective memories and Wikipedia has recently been published online by Michela Ferron (University of Trento).  (available here). 

The abstract begins: “Collective memories are precious resources for the society, because they contribute to strengthening the emotional bonding between community members, maintaining groups cohesion, and directing future behavior. Understanding the formation of the collective memories of emotional upheavals is important to a better comprehension of people's reactions and of the consequences on their psychological health. Previous studies investigated the effects of single traumatizing events, but few of them applied a quantitative approach to analyze the different psychological processes associated to the collective memories formation of upheavals on a large scale. This thesis explores the opportunities of applying quantitative methods to the study of collective memories in a collaborative environment such as the English Wikipedia. First, the presence of commemoration processes in Wikipedia articles and talk pages about traumatic events will be investigated through the analysis of edit activity patterns. Second, natural language processing techniques will be applied to detect differences in the collective representations of traumatic and non traumatic events, in the temporal focus of old and recent traumatic events, and in the representations of natural and human-made disasters. Third, the temporal evolution of language related to emotional, cognitive and social processes will be analyzed in the talk pages of two different emotional upheavals, the 2005 London bombings and the 2011 Egyptian revolution. The results will confirm the interpretation of Wikipedia as a global memory place, and highlight specific psychological processes related to the formation of collective memories of different types of traumatic events, opening the way to the quantitative study of collective memory formation in digital collaborative environments.”

New review paper on social and cultural influences in autobiographical memory

In a previous volume of the Annual Review of Psychology “The Development of Autobiographical Memory” (Vol. 62 2011) a must-read review article for those interested in social, cultural and interpersonal influences in the development of autobiographical memory by Robyn Fivush (visit the website of the Family Narratives Lab at Emory University).

The abstract begins: “Autobiographical memory is a uniquely human system that integrates memories of past experiences into an overarching life narrative. In this review, I extend social-cultural models of autobiographical memory development and present theory and research that demonstrates that (a) autobiographical memory is a gradually developing system across childhood and adolescence that depends on the development of a sense of subjective self as continuous in time; (b) autobiographical memory develops within specific social and cultural contexts that relate to individual, gendered, and cultural differences in adults’ autobiographical memories, and, more specifically, (c) mothers who reminisce with their young children in elaborated and evaluative ways have children who develop more detailed, coherent, and evaluative autobiographical memories."