Professor Suparna Rajaram (Stony Brook University)
Title: Social Remembering: A Cognitive Perspective
Date and time: November 27, 11:00
Location: Sala de Conferencias 2 (CIMCYC)
Abstract: Shared stories are the glue of our social lives. As social animals, families, partners, friends, study groups, work teams, and more broadly, communities and societies develop shared representations of their past. These collective memories fulfill a variety of personal, cultural, educational, and political goals, and have long been topics of interest in history, anthropology, sociology, and social psychology. By contrast, cognitive psychological investigation has lagged despite early interests in the social transmission of memory in Bartlett's seminal 1932 treatise. Over a century of scientific experimental research on memory has instead almost exclusively focused on the individual. Leveraging the principles developed in this foundation of experimental research on individual memory ability, my research group investigates social influences on memory. This paradigm shift opens the opportunity to examine how individual memory constraints shape the performance of the group, and in turn, how collaborative remembering by a group reshapes the memory of each member. Our key questions include how memory contagion spreads in groups for both true and false information, how contagion patterns shift in larger groups containing both direct and indirect social connections, and how social transmission of information synchronizes memory across people. I will discuss data and theory from my lab on the cognitive mechanisms that shape how people remember, misremember, forget, and synchronize information by working in groups. This experimental approach has the potential to offer insights into how social transmission of memory influences human thinking, decision making, behavior, and a range of socially relevant endeavors.