Description
Collaboration with other people can homogenize memories (e.g., Greeley et al., 2022) such that people who previously collaboratively remembered together end up remembering – and forgetting – similar memories even after collaboration has ended. This homogenization of cognition via collaboration has been theorized as a crucial underpinning for how groups of people create and maintain collective memories (e.g., Rajaram et al., 2022). In my own work, I examine how collaboration can give rise to collective memories:
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- Peña, T., Pepe, N.W., & Rajaram (in press) JEP:LMC
- Rajaram S., Greeley, G.D., & Peña, T. (2025) [book chapter]
- Greeley, G.D., Peña, T., Pepe, N.W., Choi, H.-Y., & Rajaram, S. (2025) Canadian JEP
- Pepe, N., Moyer, A., Peña, T., & Rajaram, S. (2023) PBR
- Greeley, G. D., Peña, T., & Rajaram, S. (2022) MMM
- Rajaram, S., Peña, T., & Greeley, G. D. (2022) [book chapter]
Excerpt from Peña et al. (in press) at JEP:LMC
“Across both experiments, collaborative groups exhibited greater collective memory compared to both their part-list cued counterparts and the nominal groups. It is also noteworthy that collective memory scores did not differ between part-list cued and nominal conditi ons even though part-list cued participants viewed the same cues as the participants in the collaborative condition. These findings converge on prior research demonstrating the importance of collaborative processes for giving rise to collective memory (Choi et al., 2014; Congleton & Rajaram, 2014). That is, these results underscore how conversational exchange of information, with the multiple consequences of collaborating with others – for example, disruption during recall, cross-cuing, re-exposure, and error pruning - engender a reconstructive memory process. This process of joint reconstruction, in turn, homogenizes group members’ memories (Bartlett, 1932; Rajaram, 2017; Wertsch & Roediger, 2008).”