Collective Memory Is More Than What We Remember: Quantifying Interconnections

Abstract

For more than a century, experimental research on human memory has focused on individuals learning and remembering in isolation; memory scientists began a study of social influences in earnest only in the last 3 decades. A key phenomenon driving this research is collective memory, or defined in cognitive terms, memories that a group of people share. While attention has focused on the overlap in the contents of memory, we focus on deeper representations of these shared memories, namely overlap in their recall organization. Individual memory research has extensively examined how memories become organized, but this is a new arena of research on social remembering. We describe two novel applications of quantitative tools that capture at a global level the overlap in how people organize the contents of their collective memory. These two tools provide different approaches for capturing the ways in which elements become organized and give us holistic views of how people represent the interconnections in memory for a particular episode or theme. This initial research assessing the development of overlapping memory organization offers a stepping stone toward understanding how collective memory narratives and schemata emerge and potential consequences for future learning.