Distributed remembering in a social context: Effects of communicating a shared past on what is remembered

Distributed remembering in a social context: Effects of communicating a shared past on what is remembered Alin I. Coman (acoman@princeton.edu) Department of Psychology, Princeton University Princeton, New Jersey 08544 USA Gerald Echterhoff (g.echterhoff@uni-muenster.de) Department of Psychology, University of Munster Fliednerstr. 21, 48149, Munster, Germany Micah Edelson (micah.edelson@weizmann.ac.il) Department of Neurobiology, The Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, 76100, Israel William Hirst (hirst@newschool.edu) Department of Psychology, New School for Social Research, 80 Fifth Avenue, NY, NY 10003 USA Kourken Michaelian (kmichaelian@bilkent.edu.tr) Department of Philosophy, Bilkent University, Ankara, 06800, Turkey Charles B. Stone (charlie.stone@gmail.com) Psychological Sciences Research InstituteDepartment of Psychology, Universite catholique de LouvainCatholic University of Louvain, Place du Cardinal Mercier 10, B-13248, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium Keywords: Distributed cognition, memory, conversations, agent-based modeling, collective memory offer a range of different approaches. Dr. Stone explores how public speeches can induce forgetting as well as reinforce memories across a large population and thereby promote a mnemonic convergence through a single social interaction. Dr. Echterhoff considers the role of motivation in moderating conversational influences. Dr. Coman investigates whether these conversational influences propagate across large networks of individuals and can thereby promote a mnemonic convergence. Dr. Edelson examines the neuroscience underlying memory conformity. And Dr. Michaelian engages the philosophical underpinning of the concept of collective memory. In a short summation, Dr. Hirst places these papers in the larger context of social aspects of memory and moderates further discussion. Challenging Issue Remembering frequently involves collaboration among two or more individuals, often taking the form of a conversation. In some conversations, one person conveys new information to another, as when a daughter announces to her mother that she is engaged. In other conversations, two people talk to each other about a shared past, as when a couple reminisce about the evening on which they became engaged. When the conversation is about a mutually experienced event or a shared body of knowledge, it has the potential to shape both what emerges in the discussion, as, for instance, when one participant scaffolds the remembering of the other. It also has the potential to reshape how participants might subsequently remember the material, with the possibility that the memories of the participants will be more similar after the conversation than before it. In other words, what people remember is, in part, the result of how they jointly recount the past with others. Yet, despite the critical contribution of joint conversational remembering to memory, detailed study of this phenomenon is only beginning to be undertaken. The objective of this symposium is to bring together several strands of research that explores conversational, or, more generally, communicative influences on memory. The speakers Charles B. Stone A conversation can not only reinforce already existing memories and implant misleading ones, but also induce forgetting for unmentioned, but related memoriesaterial. Dr. Stone discusses how this selective remembering can induce forgetting not only in speakers, but also in listeners. In his talk, he extends the laboratory finding on induced forgetting to the effects of political speeches on public memories, showing that listening to a recent speech by the King of Belgium induced forgetting for unmentioned, but related political material, but not unmentioned, unrelated material for French-speaking