Collaborative memory: A selective review

As social beings, people intuitively value shared reminiscing. One reason for this seems to be the need for social bonding, and another has to do with the common belief that it improves memory. To understand shared remembering from a memory standpoint, we discuss cognitive experimental research on the process and the consequences of collaborative remembering. Interest in experimental investigations of social memory can be traced back to the traditions of Hermann Ebbinghaus and Frederic Bartlett, traditions that have heavily influenced our own approach to investigating these questions in the laboratory. In this chapter, we present the modal collaborative memory paradigm that has enabled an impressive array of experimental studies and helped our group develop a descriptive framework to organize several key mechanisms that come into play when individuals remember together. We discuss cognitive processes that are activated through collaborative recall, focusing on forgetting, rebounding of memory, sharing of true memories (or re-exposure), social contagion of false memories, pruning of memory errors, cross-cueing during joint remembering, the power of retrieval during collaboration, and additional mechanisms to consider. We discuss how these cognitive processes shape collaborative recall and experimental manipulations that can influence the operations of these cognitive processes. In describing these influences of collaboration on memory, we outline some antecedent cognitive conditions that shape collaborative recall as well as several post-collaborative phenomena that result from collaborative recall. The collaborative memory movement in memory research provides experimental tools to study questions on the social transmission of memory, the memory reconstruction process for individuals who engage in collaboration, and the emergence of collective memory for groups.