Collaborative Recall and the Construction of Collective Memory Organization: The Impact of Group Structure.

Collaborative recall synchronizes downstream individual retrieval processes, giving rise to collective organization. However, little is known about whether particular stimulus features (e.g., semantic relatedness) are necessary for constructing collective organization and how group dynamics (e.g., reconfiguration) moderates it. We leveraged novel quantitative measures and a rich dataset reported in recent articles to address, (a) whether collective organization emerges even for semantically unrelated material and (b) how group reconfiguration-changing partners from one recall to the next-influences collective organization. Participants studied unrelated words and completed three consecutive recalls in one of three conditions: Always recalling individually (III), collaborating with the same partners twice before recalling alone (CCI), or collaborating with different group members during two initial recalls, before recalling alone (CRI). Collective organization increased significantly following any collaboration (CCI or CRI), relative to "groups" who never collaborated (III). Interestingly, collaborating repeatedly with the same partners (CCI) did not increase collective organization compared to reconfigured groups, irrespective of the reference group structure (from Recall 1 or 2). Individuals, however, did tend to base their final individual retrieval on the most recent group recall. We discuss how the fundamental processes that underlie dynamic social interactions align the cognitive processes of many, laying the foundation for other collective phenomena, including shared biases, attitudes, and beliefs.

Unavoidable social contagion of false memory from robots to humans.

Many of us interact with voice- or text-based conversational agents daily, but these conversational agents may unintentionally retrieve misinformation from human knowledge databases, confabulate responses on their own, or purposefully spread disinformation for political purposes. Does such misinformation or disinformation become part of our memory to further misguide our decisions? If so, can we prevent humans from suffering such social contagion of false memory? Using a social contagion of memory paradigm, here, we precisely controlled a social robot as an example of these emerging conversational agents. In a series of two experiments (ΣN = 120), the social robot occasionally misinformed participants prior to a recognition memory task. We found that the robot was as powerful as humans at influencing others. Despite the supplied misinformation being emotion- and value-neutral and hence not intrinsically contagious and memorable, 77% of the socially misinformed words became the participants' false memory. To mitigate such social contagion of false memory, the robot also forewarned the participants about its reservation toward the misinformation. However, one-time forewarnings failed to reduce false memory contagion. Even relatively frequent, item-specific forewarnings could not prevent warned items from becoming false memory, although such forewarnings helped increase the participants' overall cautiousness. Therefore, we recommend designing conversational agents to, at best, avoid providing uncertain information or, at least, provide frequent forewarnings about potentially false information. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Personal and collective mental time travel across the adult lifespan during COVID-19.

Older adults exhibit an age-related positivity effect, with more positivity for memories than young adults. Theoretical explanations attribute this phenomenon to greater emphasis on emotion regulation and well-being due to shortened time horizons. Adults, across the lifespan, also exhibit a collective negativity bias (more negativity about their country than their personal past and future) and a future-oriented positivity bias (more positivity for future projections than for memories). Threats to global health (e.g., the COVID-19 pandemic) may shorten future time horizons which may serve to impact emotional valence for memories and future projections. We investigated this possibility in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic in young, middle-aged, and older adults (N = 434; age: 18-81 years), for positive and negative events in the past (2019) and future (2021) in the personal and collective domains, as well as for future excitement and worry in these same domains in 1 week, 1 year, and 5-10 years' time. We replicated the collective negativity bias and future-oriented positivity bias, indicating the robustness of these phenomena. However, the pattern of age-related positivity diverged for personal events such that young adults exhibited similar positivity to older adults and more positivity than middle-aged adults. Finally, consistent with theoretical proposals of better emotion regulation with age, older adults reported more muted excitement and worry for the long-term future compared to young adults. We discuss the implications of this work for understanding valence-based biases in memory and future projections across the adult lifespan. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Deceitful Hints: a Meta-Analytic Review of the Part-List Cuing Impairment in Recall.

A large body of research in the study of memory has accumulated to date on the part-list cuing impairment in recall. This phenomenon refers to the lower recall of studied information in the presence of some studied words provided as retrieval cues compared to when no cues are provided. We review the current literature on the part-list cuing impairment in recall and report a meta-analysis utilizing the procedural and statistical information obtained from 109 samples (N = 5,605). In each experiment, participants studied a list of words and subsequently performed a recall task either in the presence or absence of part-list cues. The meta-analysis shows that the part-list cuing impairment is a robust, medium-sized impairment (Cohen, 1988). This recall impairment was not significantly sensitive to the number of study items provided, the relationship among study items, the number of part-list cues provided, the amount of time provided for recall, or certain other factors of interest. Our analyses also demonstrate that longer retention periods between study and retrieval mitigate the part-list cuing impairment in recall. We discuss the implications of meta-analysis results for elements of experimental design, the findings of past literature, as well as the underlying theoretical mechanisms proposed to account for this impairment in recall and the applied consequences of this recall impairment.

Collective memory: Collaborative recall synchronizes what and how people remember.

Memory researchers and theorists have long advanced the idea that the manner in which information is retrieved is critical. The way retrieval unfolds provides critical insights into how memories are organized and accessed-an important aspect of memory missed by focusing only on quantity. Cognitive studies of memory in social contexts, deploying the collaborative memory paradigm, have also noted the importance of such retrieval organization. Such memory studies often focus on how relative to "groups" that never collaborated, former members of collaborating groups recall more of the same material (collective memory) and they do so in a more synchronized fashion (collective retrieval organization). In this review, we leverage the diverse methodological and quantitative toolkits that have traditionally targeted individual retrieval to highlight the ways in which this social memory research has examined collective memory and collective retrieval organization. To that end, we consider how the collaborative memory paradigm has integrated methods, such as free recall, that afford rich assessments of retrieval organization. Likewise, we consider the application of metrics that characterize organization patterns in different contexts. With this background in mind, we discuss the important theoretical and broader implications of research on collective memory and collective retrieval organization. This article is categorized under: Psychology > Memory.

Consideration of culture in cognition: How we can enrich methodology and theory.

In this paper, we argue that adopting an inclusive approach where diverse cultures are represented in research is of prime importance for cognitive psychology. The overrepresentation of participant samples and researchers from WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) cultures limits the generalizability of findings and fails to capture potential sources of variability, impeding understanding of human cognition. In an analysis of articles in representative cognitive psychology journals over the five-year period of 2016-2020, we find that only approximately 7% of articles consider culture, broadly defined. Of these articles, a majority (83%) focus on language or bilingualism, with small numbers of articles considering other aspects of culture. We argue that methodology and theory developed in the last century of cognitive research not only can be leveraged, but will be enriched by greater diversity in both populations and researchers. Such advances pave the way to uncover cognitive processes that may be universal or systematically differ as a function of cultural variations, and the individual differences in relation to cultural variations. To make a case for broadening this scope, we characterize relevant cross-cultural research, sample classic cognitive research that is congruent with such an approach, and discuss compatibility between a cross-cultural perspective and the classic tenets of cognitive psychology. We make recommendations for large and small steps for the field to incorporate greater cultural representation in the study of cognition, while recognizing the challenges associated with these efforts and acknowledging that not every research question calls for a cross-cultural perspective.

Collective memory and the individual mind.

How does social transmission of information shape individual and collective memory? Taking a cognitive-experimental perspective, I propose three critical research themes to tackle in the next 25 years: the dynamic reciprocity of influence between the individual and the collective; changes in the individual and collective memory structures; and the impact of culture.

Neurocognitive mechanisms of collaborative recall.

Research on collaborative memory shows that people recalling in groups rarely achieve optimal performance. Collaborative groups typically recall less than nominal groups, where performance for the latter is derived by pooling the non-overlapping information recalled by the same number of individuals working alone. While behavioural evidence has widely replicated this collaborative inhibition in free recall, little evidence speaks to the neurophysiological signatures of this counterintuitive phenomenon. Behavioural evidence also indicates that disruption to one's preferred recall strategy, resulting from processing others' recalled information, is a key mechanism underlying this effect. We aimed to identify the neural signatures indexing the recollection process and their disruption during collaborative recall. In three experiments, we replicated the standard collaborative inhibition effect with an EEG-adapted procedure (Experiment 1), and recorded EEG while people recalled in groups or in isolation (Experiments 2a, 2b). Comparisons showed increments in N400 and theta power, the neurophysiological components associated with interference, at shorter intervals for the collaborative compared to the nominal groups. Stronger theta power for collaborative than nominal recall, and for speakers than non-speakers in collaborative groups, were also evident at longer intervals and suggest demanding reinstatement of memory associated with collaborative recall. Together, the results suggest distinct neural processes underlying collaborative inhibition, with neural responses at shorter intervals signaling processes that are consistent with strategy disruption (stronger interference signaled by N400 and theta power increments), and further increments in theta at later times suggesting more demanding reinstatement processes during collaborative remembering.

Episodic Memory Performance Modifies the Strength of the Age-Brain Structure Relationship.

The bivariate relationships between brain structure, age, and episodic memory performance are well understood. Advancing age and poorer episodic memory performance are each associated with smaller brain volumes and lower cortical thickness measures, respectively. Advancing age is also known to be associated with poorer episodic memory task scores on average. However, the simultaneous interrelationship between all three factors-brain structure, age, and episodic memory-is not as well understood. We tested the hypothesis that the preservation of episodic memory function would modify the typical trajectory of age-related brain volume loss in regions known to support episodic memory function using linear mixed models in a large adult lifespan sample. We found that the model allowing for age and episodic memory scores to interact predicted the hippocampal volume better than simpler models. Furthermore, we found that a model including a fixed effect for age and episodic memory scores (but without the inclusion of the interaction term) predicted the cortical volumes marginally better than a simpler model in the prefrontal regions and significantly better in the posterior parietal regions. Finally, we observed that a model containing only a fixed effect for age (e.g., without the inclusion of memory scores) predicted the cortical thickness estimates and regional volume in a non-memory control region. Together, our findings provide support for the idea that the preservation of memory function in late life can buffer against typical patterns of age-related brain volume loss in regions known to support episodic memory.

Association of attention and memory biases for negative stimuli with post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms.

Cognitive models have highlighted the role of attentional and memory biases towards negatively-valenced emotional stimuli in the maintenance of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). However, previous research has focused mainly on attentional biases towards distracting (task-irrelevant) negative stimuli. Furthermore, attentional and memory biases have been examined in isolation and the links between them remain underexplored. We manipulated attention during encoding of trauma-unrelated negative and neutral words and examined the differential relationship of their encoding and recall with PTSD symptoms. Responders to the World Trade Center disaster (N = 392) performed tasks in which they read negative and neutral words and reported the color of another set of such words. Subsequently, participants used word stems to aid retrieval of words shown earlier. PTSD symptoms were associated with slower response times for negative versus neutral words in the word-reading task (r = 0.170) but not color-naming task. Furthermore, greater PTSD symptom severity was associated with more accurate recall of negative versus neutral words, irrespective of whether words were encoded during word-reading or color-naming tasks (F = 4.11, p = 0.044, ηp2 = 0.018). Our results show that PTSD symptoms in a trauma-exposed population are related to encoding of trauma-unrelated negative versus neutral stimuli only when attention was voluntarily directed towards the emotional aspects of the stimuli and to subsequent recall of negative stimuli, irrespective of attention during encoding.

Persistence of false memories and emergence of collective false memory: collaborative recall of DRM word lists.

Information and misinformation are proliferating on social media. A rapid rise in the use of these platforms makes it important to identify psychological mechanisms that underlie the production, propagation, and convergence of false memories in groups. Websites and social media platforms vary in the extent of restrictions placed on interactive communication (e.g., group chats, threaded or disabled comments, direct messaging), prompting questions about the impact of different interaction styles on false memory production. We tested this question in a laboratory analog of interaction styles and compared two well-known procedures of collaboration, free-for-all and turn-taking. To expose participants to information known to promote recall of both true and false information, we used the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) word lists (Roediger & McDermott, 1995). Participants recalled these words using free-for-all collaboration, turn-taking collaboration, or individually. Next, all participants individually recalled the studied items. Turn-taking produced more false memories in group recall than did free-for-all collaboration, replicating past findings. Novel findings showed that former group members exhibited social contagion following both interaction styles, where they produced more false information in later individual recall and exhibited collective false memories. We discuss the implications for the emergence and convergence of true and false memories among users online.

When social influences reduce false recognition memory: A case of categorically related information.

Social interactions create opportunities for reminiscence and memory rehearsal but can also lead to memory errors. We tested how the type of information people remember can influence the magnitude of memory errors they make following collaborative discussion. Past findings show that unrelated item lists and emotional salient items reduce false alarms and improve memory discrimination, respectively, on an individual recognition test after collaborative discussion compared to no prior collaboration. In contrast, for associatively related materials with high relatedness (e.g., bed, rest, awake, tired, dream, etc.) collaboration increases false recognition memory for the critical lures (e.g., sleep) on a later individual test. We tested whether the error-pruning benefits of collaboration are restricted to unrelated and emotional information or can also occur for other classes of related information that produce high memory errors. Using categorized stimuli, we created conditions that produced high or low memory errors for the same targets (12 versus 2 target exemplars per category across study lists of equal length). Replicating past research, collaboration increased the accuracy of recognition memory and large category size decreased it. The critical novel finding showed that collaboration pruned individual recognition errors by reducing false alarms not only in the low memory error condition but also the high memory error condition. This study delineates the conditions where collaboration can prune memory errors for related information.

Social Transmission of False Memory in Small Groups and Large Networks.

Sharing information and memories is a key feature of social interactions, making social contexts important for developing and transmitting accurate memories and also false memories. False memory transmission can have wide-ranging effects, including shaping personal memories of individuals as well as collective memories of a network of people. This paper reviews a collection of key findings and explanations in cognitive research on the transmission of false memories in small groups. It also reviews the emerging experimental work on larger networks and collective false memories. Given the reconstructive nature of memory, the abundance of misinformation in everyday life, and the variety of social structures in which people interact, an understanding of transmission of false memories has both scientific and societal implications.

Collaborative remembering of emotional autobiographical memories: Implications for emotion regulation and collective memory.

People frequently engage in conversation about shared autobiographical events from their lives, particularly those with emotional significance. The pervasiveness of this practice raises the question whether shared memory reconstruction has the power to influence the memory and emotions associated with such events. We developed a novel paradigm that combined the strengths of the methods from autobiographical and collaborative memory research traditions to examine such consequences. We selected a shared, real-life autobiographical event of an exam, and asked students to recall their memory of taking a recent exam where they provided a group and/or personal narrative of this autobiographical event. Students first recalled the event either collaboratively (C) or individually (I), followed by a final individual (I) recall by all. Valence ratings as well as the emotional tone of the narratives converged to show that prior collaborative remembering down-regulated negative emotion and enhanced the positive emotional tone of the memories. The recalled detail in the narratives indicated that at initial recall members of collaborative groups reported fewer internal details than those who recalled alone, and reported more external details in a later recall when working alone. Earlier collaboration also increased collective memory such that more of these details were shared among prior group members in their later individual recall compared with those who did not collaborate before. We discuss the influence of collaborative remembering on shaping memory and emotion for autobiographical events as well as the potential mechanisms that promote collective autobiographical memory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Memory for dangers past: threat contexts produce more consistent learning than do non-threatening contexts.

In earlier work we showed that individuals learn the spatial regularities within contexts and use this knowledge to guide detection of threatening targets embedded in these contexts. While it is highly adaptive for humans to use contextual learning to detect threats, it is equally adaptive for individuals to flexibly readjust behaviour when contexts once associated with threatening stimuli begin to be associated with benign stimuli, and vice versa. Here, we presented face targets varying in salience (threatening or non-threatening) in new or old spatial configurations (contexts) and changed the target salience (threatening to non-threatening and vice versa) halfway through the experiment to examine if contextual learning changes with the change in target salience. Detection of threatening targets was faster in old than new configurations and this learning persisted even after the target changed to non-threatening. However, the same pattern was not seen when the targets changed from non-threatening to threatening. Overall, our findings show that threat detection is driven not only by stimulus properties as theorised traditionally but also by the learning of contexts in which threatening stimuli appear, highlighting the importance of top-down factors in threat detection. Further, learning of contexts associated with threatening targets is robust and speeds detection of non-threatening targets subsequently presented in the same context.

Mnemonic transmission, social contagion, and emergence of collective memory: Influence of emotional valence, group structure, and information distribution.

Social transmission of memory and its consequence on collective memory have generated enduring interdisciplinary interest because of their widespread significance in interpersonal, sociocultural, and political arenas. We tested the influence of 3 key factors-emotional salience of information, group structure, and information distribution-on mnemonic transmission, social contagion, and collective memory. Participants individually studied emotionally salient (negative or positive) and nonemotional (neutral) picture-word pairs that were completely shared, partially shared, or unshared within participant triads, and then completed 3 consecutive recalls in 1 of 3 conditions: individual-individual-individual (control), collaborative-collaborative (identical group; insular structure)-individual, and collaborative-collaborative (reconfigured group; diverse structure)-individual. Collaboration enhanced negative memories especially in insular group structure and especially for shared information, and promoted collective forgetting of positive memories. Diverse group structure reduced this negativity effect. Unequally distributed information led to social contagion that creates false memories; diverse structure propagated a greater variety of false memories whereas insular structure promoted confidence in false recognition and false collective memory. A simultaneous assessment of network structure, information distribution, and emotional valence breaks new ground to specify how network structure shapes the spread of negative memories and false memories, and the emergence of collective memory. (PsycINFO Database Record

Context learning for threat detection.

It is hypothesised that threatening stimuli are detected better due to their salience or physical properties. However, these stimuli are typically embedded in a rich context, motivating the question whether threat detection is facilitated via learning of contexts in which threat stimuli appear. To address this question, we presented threatening face targets in new or old spatial configurations consisting of schematic faces and found that detection of threatening targets was faster in old configurations. This indicates that individuals are able to learn regularities within visual contexts and use this contextual information to guide detection of threatening targets. Next, we presented threatening and non-threatening face targets embedded in new or old spatial configurations. Detection of threatening targets was facilitated in old configurations, and this effect was reversed for non-threatening targets. Present findings show that detection of threatening targets is driven not only by stimulus properties as theorised traditionally but also by learning of contexts in which threatening stimuli appear. Further, results show that context learning for threatening targets obstructs context learning for non-threatening targets. Overall, in addition to typically emphasised bottom-up factors, our findings highlight the importance of top-down factors such as context and learning in detection of salient, threatening stimuli.

How social interactions affect emotional memory accuracy: Evidence from collaborative retrieval and social contagion paradigms.

In daily life, emotional events are often discussed with others. The influence of these social interactions on the veracity of emotional memories has rarely been investigated. The authors (Choi, Kensinger, & Rajaram Memory and Cognition, 41, 403-415, 2013) previously demonstrated that when the categorical relatedness of information is controlled, emotional items are more accurately remembered than neutral items. The present study examined whether emotion would continue to improve the accuracy of memory when individuals discussed the emotional and neutral events with others. Two different paradigms involving social influences were used to investigate this question and compare evidence. In both paradigms, participants studied stimuli that were grouped into conceptual categories of positive (e.g., celebration), negative (e.g., funeral), or neutral (e.g., astronomy) valence. After a 48-hour delay, recognition memory was tested for studied items and categorically related lures. In the first paradigm, recognition accuracy was compared when memory was tested individually or in a collaborative triad. In the second paradigm, recognition accuracy was compared when a prior retrieval session had occurred individually or with a confederate who supplied categorically related lures. In both of these paradigms, emotional stimuli were remembered more accurately than were neutral stimuli, and this pattern was preserved when social interaction occurred. In fact, in the first paradigm, there was a trend for collaboration to increase the beneficial effect of emotion on memory accuracy, and in the second paradigm, emotional lures were significantly less susceptible to the "social contagion" effect. Together, these results demonstrate that emotional memories can be more accurate than nonemotional ones even when events are discussed with others (Experiment 1) and even when that discussion introduces misinformation (Experiment 2).

Memory Transmission in Small Groups and Large Networks: An Agent-Based Model.

The spread of social influence in large social networks has long been an interest of social scientists. In the domain of memory, collaborative memory experiments have illuminated cognitive mechanisms that allow information to be transmitted between interacting individuals, but these experiments have focused on small-scale social contexts. In the current study, we took a computational approach, circumventing the practical constraints of laboratory paradigms and providing novel results at scales unreachable by laboratory methodologies. Our model embodied theoretical knowledge derived from small-group experiments and replicated foundational results regarding collaborative inhibition and memory convergence in small groups. Ultimately, we investigated large-scale, realistic social networks and found that agents are influenced by the agents with which they interact, but we also found that agents are influenced by nonneighbors (i.e., the neighbors of their neighbors). The similarity between these results and the reports of behavioral transmission in large networks offers a major theoretical insight by linking behavioral transmission to the spread of information.

Why two heads apart are better than two heads together: multiple mechanisms underlie the collaborative inhibition effect in memory.

Although a group of people working together remembers more than any one individual, they recall less than their predicted potential. This finding is known as collaborative inhibition and is generally thought to arise due to retrieval disruption. However, there is growing evidence that is inconsistent with the retrieval disruption account, suggesting that additional mechanisms also contribute to collaborative inhibition. In the current studies, we examined 2 alternate mechanisms: retrieval inhibition and retrieval blocking. To identify the contributions of retrieval disruption, retrieval inhibition, and retrieval blocking, we tested how collaborative recall of entirely unshared information influences subsequent individual recall and individual recognition memory. If collaborative inhibition is due solely to retrieval disruption, then there should be a release from the negative effects of collaboration on subsequent individual recall and recognition tests. If it is due to retrieval inhibition, then the negative effects of collaboration should persist on both individual recall and recognition memory tests. Finally, if it is due to retrieval blocking, then the impairment should persist on subsequent individual free recall, but not recognition, tests. Novel to the current study, results suggest that retrieval inhibition plays a role in the collaborative inhibition effect. The negative effects of collaboration persisted on a subsequent, always-individual, free-recall test (Experiment 1) and also on a subsequent, always-individual, recognition test (Experiment 2). However, consistent with the retrieval disruption account, this deficit was attenuated (Experiment 1). Together, these results suggest that, in addition to retrieval disruption, multiple mechanisms play a role in collaborative inhibition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).