Costs and benefits of collaborative remembering

Collaborative inhibition, the poorer memory performance of collaborative groups as compared with nominal (noninteracting) groups was measured in the free recall of categorized lists. In Experiment 1, collaborative inhibition was present in four‐person groups, but not in pairs of two‐person groups, where each was compared with performance in four‐person nominal groups. However, on a final individual free recall test, members of two‐ and four‐person collaborative groups recalled a higher proportion of the list than members of nominal groups. In Experiment 2, recall in three‐person collaborative groups was less than in three‐person nominal groups but only on the first of three successive study‐test trials. On the final individual free recall test, members of collaborative groups recalled more words than members of nominal groups. Despite inhibiting recall and reminiscence, collaboration benefits remembering when collaborators are subsequently tested individually. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Collaboration enhances later individual memory for emotional material

Research on collaborative remembering suggests that collaboration hampers group memory (i.e., collaborative inhibition), yet enhances later individual memory. Studies examining collaborative effects on memory for emotional stimuli are scarce, especially concerning later individual memory. In the present study, female undergraduates watched an emotional movie and recalled it either collaboratively (n?=?60) or individually (n?=?60), followed by an individual free recall test and a recognition test. We replicated the standard collaborative inhibition effect. Further, in line with the literature, the collaborative condition displayed better post-collaborative individual memory. More importantly, in post-collaborative free recall, the centrality of the information to the movie plot did not play an important role. Recognition rendered slightly different results. Although collaboration rendered more correct recognition for more central details, it did not enhance recognition of background details. Secondly, the collaborative and individual conditions did not differ with respect to overlap of unique correct items in free recall. Yet, during recognition former collaborators more unanimously endorsed correct answers, as well as errors. Finally, extraversion, neuroticism, social anxiety, and depressive symptoms did not moderate the influence of collaboration on memory. Implications for the fields of forensic and clinical psychology are discussed.     

Conversation and remembering: Bartlett revisited

Bartlett's book Remembering (1932) is frequently cited as a major forerunner of the information processing approach to memory and cognition. This approach has itself been criticized by one of its founders, Ulric Neisser (1982), for its narrowness and artificiality compared with the nature of remembering in natural contexts. A re-examination of Bartlett's work demonstrates that it offers little basis for an information processing approach, but rather that it offers the foundation of a much broader, culturally contextualized and functional approach to the study of everyday remembering. Three particular themes are discussed: the integration of social judgements and affective reactions with cognition, the role of conventional symbols in the coding and communication of experience, and the importance of conversational discourse. Bartlett's best-known studies, involving the method of serial reproduction, are shown to be microcosmic demonstrations of the process that he was most concerned with—that of conventionalization of symbols rather than of the workings of an individual's memory. It is argued, again beginning with Bartlett, that everyday remembering may be most fruitfully studied in terms of its personal and social functions, and particularly through its realization in discourse.     

The effects of environmental context on recognition memory and claims of remembering

Recognition memory for words was tested in same or different contexts using the remember/know response procedure. Context was manipulated by presenting words in different screen colors and locations and by presenting words against real-world photographs. Overall hit and false-alarm rates were higher for tests presented in an old context compared to a new context. This concordant effect was seen in both remember responses and estimates of familiarity. Similar results were found for rearranged pairings of old study contexts and targets, for study contexts that were unique or were repeated with different words, and for new picture contexts that were physically similar to old contexts. Similar results were also found when subjects focused attention on the study words, but a different pattern of results was obtained when subjects explicitly associated the study words with their picture context. The results show that subjective feelings of recollection play a role in the effects of environmental context but are likely based more on a sense of familiarity that is evoked by the context than on explicit associations between targets and their study context.     

Collaborative remembering in older adults: age-invariant outcomes in the context of episodic recall deficits

Rapidly growing research reveals complex yet systematic consequences of collaboration on memory in young adults, but much less is known about this phenomenon in older adults. Young and older adults studied a list of categorized words and took three successive recall tests. Test 1 and 3 were always taken individually, and Test 2 was done either in triads or alone. Despite older adults recalling less overall than young adults, both age groups exhibited similar costs and benefits of collaboration: Collaboration reduced both correct and false recall during collaborative remembering, was associated with more positive beliefs about its value, and produced reminiscence, collective memory, and some forgetting in its cascading effects on postcollaborative recall. We examine the role of retrieval organization in these effects. As environmental support may play a substantial role in healthy aging, the relatively preserved effects of collaboration on memory in older adults hold promise for testing judicious uses of group remembering in aging.     

Enhancing individual and collaborative eyewitness memory with category clustering recall

Most crimes have multiple eyewitnesses. The police typically interview co-witnesses separately. In time-sensitive investigations, this could slow down evidence accumulation. Having co-witnesses collaboratively recall a crime could potentially expedite evidence accumulation. However, past research shows that collaborative group members often have conflicting retrieval strategies that disrupt each other, degrading overall recall. This cost could potentially be overcome by aligning group members’ retrieval strategies with category clustering recall (CCR), which is a retrieval strategy where information is recalled from a series of forensically relevant categories (e.g., recalling the protagonists’ appearance, then actions). This study examined the costs and benefits of collaborative eyewitness memory by having collaborative pairs of strangers, nominal pairs (i.e., two individuals whose recall is pooled) and lone individuals watch a crime and recall it using free recall or CCR. The collaborative pairs recalled the crime faster than the nominal pairs. They also recalled more correct information than individuals but less than nominal pairs, irrespective of the retrieval method. There is therefore a speed-recall completeness trade-off when collaborative groups recall crimes. Importantly, all participants recalled more correct information when using CCR. This provides initial evidence suggesting that CCR is superior to free recall. Further research examining CCR’s benefits is recommended.     

Episodic remembering creates access to involuntary conscious memory: demonstrating involuntary recall on a voluntary recall task

The idea that involuntary memory retrieval might occur during voluntary memory retrieval can be traced back to Ebbinghaus (1885/1964). However, methodological challenges have stood in the way of testing this idea. Recent diary studies of naturally occurring involuntary memories have provided insights into how this idea could be tested (Berntsen, 1998; Mace, 2005b, 2006). These studies have shown that the contents of an involuntary memory sometimes trigger additional involuntary memories, a process called chaining. It was hypothesised that chaining should also occur on autobiographical memory tasks, and this was tested in the present study by asking participants in an autobiographical memory task to report the presence of involuntary memories while they were performing the task. The results showed that involuntary memories did occur when participants were recalling the past. The results also showed involuntary memories dissociating from voluntary memories on two independent measures, thereby enhancing the credibility of the results.     

Examining the costs and benefits of inhibition in memory retrieval

Inhibitory control is thought to serve an adaptive function in controlling behavior, with individual differences predicting variation in numerous cognitive functions. However, inhibition is more properly construed as inducing both benefits and costs to performance. Benefits arise at the point when inhibition prevents expression of an unwanted or contextually inappropriate response; costs arise later, when access to the inhibited representation is required by other processes. Here we illustrate how failure to consider both the costs and benefits of inhibition has generated confusion in the literature on individual differences in cognitive control. Using retrieval-induced forgetting as a model case, we illustrate this by showing that changing the way that retrieval-induced forgetting is measured to allow greater expression of the benefits of inhibition together with the costs can reduce and even reverse the theoretically predicted correlation between motor and memory inhibition. Specifically, we show that when the final test in a retrieval-induced forgetting procedure employs item-specific cues (i.e., category-plus-stem cued recall and item-recognition) that better isolate the lingering costs of inhibition, better motor response inhibition (faster stop-signal reaction times) predicts greater retrieval-induced forgetting. In striking contrast, when the final test is less well controlled, allowing both the costs and benefits of inhibition to contribute, motor response inhibition has the opposite relationship with retrieval-induced forgetting. These findings underscore the importance of considering the correlated costs and benefits problem when studying individual differences in inhibitory control. More generally, they suggest that a shared inhibition mechanism may underlie people’s ability to control memories and actions.     

Episodic remembering creates access to involuntary conscious memory: Demonstrating involuntary recall on a voluntary recall task

The idea that involuntary memory retrieval might occur during voluntary memory retrieval can be traced back to Ebbinghaus (1885/1964). However, methodological challenges have stood in the way of testing this idea. Recent diary studies of naturally occurring involuntary memories have provided insights into how this idea could be tested (Berntsen, 1998; Mace, 2005b, 2006). These studies have shown that the contents of an involuntary memory sometimes trigger additional involuntary memories, a process called chaining. It was hypothesised that chaining should also occur on autobiographical memory tasks, and this was tested in the present study by asking participants in an autobiographical memory task to report the presence of involuntary memories while they were performing the task. The results showed that involuntary memories did occur when participants were recalling the past. The results also showed involuntary memories dissociating from voluntary memories on two independent measures, thereby enhancing the credibility of the results.     

The Chancellor's memory: Rhetoric and truth in discursive remembering

This paper explores the notion of truthfulness in research on conversational remembering. It argues that people's accounts of past events, before they can be taken as data on the cognitive workings of memory, need to be examined as contextualized and variable productions that perform pragmatic and rhetorical work; no one version can be taken as a person's real memory. The consequences of this discourse-analytical perspective are examined first through a critical discussion of Ulric Neisser's study of John Dean's testimony to the senate ‘Watergate’ committee. The issues are then explored more deeply in an analysis of reportings of a different event, in which similar (Watergate-like) issues of memory, truth and accuracy are also at issue. It is argued that: (a) all of Neisser's three kinds of memory–verbatim, gist and ‘repisodic’–involve problematical assumptions concerning their relation to some true, original event; and (b) that Dean's accounts of his memory and his displays of memory should be approached as occasioned productions oriented pragmatically to the assignment of guilt and avoidance of scapegoating. Through an analysis of newspaper reports (based on memory) of a controversial briefing given by the then British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson, we then examine: (a) how discourse about what could be used as an arbiter of truth was rhetorically organized; (b) how participants' versions of events were constructed rhetorically, as parts of arguments; (c) that both sides in the dispute maintained the coherence of their positions by a form of error accounting similar to that used by Neisser with respect to Dean. It is suggested that cognitive psychologists, whether working in the laboratory or attempting to do real-world studies of everyday remembering, need to avoid simplistic notions of true original events, and can do so by addressing the rhetorical organization of participants' memory accounts.     

Rewarded remembering: dissociations between self-rated motivation and memory performance

People often claim that they perform better in memory performance tasks when they are more motivated. However, past research has shown minimal effects of motivation on memory performance when factors contributing to item-specific biases during encoding and retrieval are taken into account. The purpose of the present study was to examine the generality of this apparent dissociation by using more sensitive measures of experienced motivation and memory performance. Extrinsic motivation was manipulated through competition instructions, and subjective ratings of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation were obtained before and after study instructions. Participants studied a series of words, and memory performance was assessed by content recall (Experiment 1) and source recall (Experiment 2). Both experiments showed dissociation between subjective ratings of extrinsic motivation and actual memory performance, so that competition increased self-rated extrinsic motivation but had no effects on memory performance, including source recall. Inconsistent with most people's expectations, the findings suggest that extrinsic motivation has minimal effects on memory performance.     

Binding and inhibition in working memory: individual and age differences in short-term recognition

Two studies investigated the relationship between working memory capacity (WMC), adult age, and the resolution of conflict between familiarity and recollection in short-term recognition tasks. Experiment 1 showed a specific deficit of young adults with low WMC in rejecting intrusion probes (i.e., highly familiar probes) in a modified Sternberg task, which was similar to the deficit found in old adults in a parallel experiment (K. Oberauer, 2001). Experiment 2 generalized these results to 3 recognition paradigms (modified Sternberg, local recognition, and n back tasks). Old adults showed disproportional performance deficits on intrusion probes only in terms of reaction times, whereas young adults with low WMC showed them only in terms of errors. The generality of the effect across paradigms is more compatible with a deficit in content-context bindings subserving recollection than with a deficit in inhibition of irrelevant information in working memory. Structural equation models showed that WMC is related to the efficiency of recollection but not of familiarity.     

Predicting individual false alarm rates and signal detection theory: A role for remembering

The relationships between hit, remember, and false alarm rates were examined across individual subjects in three remember-know experiments in order to determine whether signal detection theory would be consistent with the observed data. The experimental data differed from signal detection predictions in two critical ways. First, remember reports were unrelated, or slightly negatively related, to the commission of false alarms. Second, both response types (remembers and false alarms) were uniquely related to hit rates, which demonstrated that the hit rate cannot be viewed as the result of a single underlying strength process. These results are consistent with the dual-process signal detection model of Yonelinas (1994), in which performance is determined by two independent processes--retrieval of categorical context information (remembering) and discriminations based on continuous item strength. Remember and false alarm rates selectively tap these processes, whereas the hit rate is jointly determined. Monte Carlo simulations in which the dual-process model was used successfully reproduced the pattern in the experimental data, whereas simulations in which a signal detection model, with separate "old" and "remember" criteria, was used, did not. The results demonstrate the utility of examining individual differences in response types when one is evaluating memory models.     

Children's memory for medical emergencies: 2 years later

Long-term recall of medical emergencies (including both injury and hospital treatment) by 2- to 13-year-olds was assessed 2 years after injury. Event identity was important: Children recalled injury details better than hospital treatment. Ninety-six children were interviewed 3 times prior to the 2-year recall; amount recalled decreased only for hospital treatment details, although accuracy of recall decreased for both injury and treatment. Twenty-one children were interviewed only twice prior to the 2-year interview. An extra interview 1 year after their injury had little effect on how much older children recalled about both injury and treatment or how much younger children recalled about injury details, but it helped younger children recall the less memorable hospital event. The extra interview also helped all children maintain accuracy when recalling hospital details but was unnecessary for the more memorable injury event. Implications for children's testimony are discussed.     

School vandalism: individual and social context

Six hundred Israeli students responded to a questionnaire dealing with five motives for participating in vandalism: anger/frustration, boredom, erosion, aesthetics, and catharsis (Cohen, 1984). As we did not find a coherent pattern, we created a variable comprising all five motives: general motivation. Four factors accounted for motivation to participate in destructive behavior: perceived level of vandalism at school, attitude toward school, attitude toward teacher, and school anxiety. Punishment, father's level of education, sense of hope, and class level did not have an effect on motivation to participate in vandalism. It was concluded that the social context is a crucial element in school vandalism.     

Emotional memory for words: Separating content and context

We developed a technique to examine the effects of emotional content and context on verbal memory. Two sets of sentences were devised: in the first, each sentence was emotionally arousing due to the inclusion of an emotional “target” word. In the second set, “targets” were replaced with well-matched neutral words. Subjects read aloud a selection of emotional and neutral sentences, and were then surprised with memory tasks after a range of time delays. Emotional target words were remembered significantly better than neutral words in all experiments. Recognition of emotional words was relatively stable despite increasing delays between encoding and recognition testing, in contrast to memory for neutral words, which decayed over time. Memory for neutral non-target words was enhanced when words had been presented in an emotional context. The results confirm the phenomenon of emotional enhancement of memory at short and long delays and suggest that emotional context may be encoded independently of word meaning.     

Verbatim and gist memory and individual differences in inhibition,sustained attention,and working memory capacity

In the present study, we explored whether individual differences in inhibition, sustained attention, and working memory capacity (WMC) are related to false memory task performance. We defined the processes in such a task according to the fuzzy trace theory and used multinomial modelling methodology to measure the contribution of these latent processes. We found higher verbatim memory in participants with a high WMC, as measured by the Rotation Span task, and in individuals who committed more errors in the Sustained Attention Response Task (SART). Participants with a high WMC and low-error level in SART showed higher gist memory for targets, and individuals high in WMC also rejected orthographically related distractors more effectively due to the recollection of distractors’ corresponding targets. We also observed that participants with better inhibition control were more conservative in guessing that an item was old.     

Emotion and memory: Children's long-term remembering, forgetting, and suggestibility

Children's memories for an experienced and a never-experienced medical procedure were examined. Three- to 13-year-olds were questioned about a voiding cystourethrogram fluoroscopy (VCUG) they endured between 2 and 6 years of age. Children 4 years or older at VCUG were more accurate than children younger than 4 at VCUG. Longer delays were associated with providing fewer units of correct information but not with more inaccuracies. Parental avoidant attachment style was related to increased errors in children's VCUG memory. Children were more likely to assent to the false medical procedure when it was alluded to briefly than when described in detail, and false assents were related to fewer "do-not-know" responses about the VCUG. Results have implications for childhood amnesia, stress and memory, individual differences, and eyewitness testimony.