David Manier

Towards a psychology of collective memory

This article discusses the place of psychology within the now voluminous social scientific literature on collective memory. Many social scientists locate collective memories in the social resources that shape them. For scholars adopting this perspective, collective memories are viewed as transcending individuals; that is, as being “in the world”. Others recognise that, in the final analysis, individuals must remember collective as well as individual memories. These scholars treat collective memories as shared individual memories. We attempt to bridge these two approaches by distinguishing between the design of social resources and memory practices, on one hand, and on the other, the effectiveness of each in forming and transforming the memories held by individuals and the psychological mechanisms that guide this effectiveness.

On the formation of collective memories: The role of a dominant narrator

To test our hypothesis that conversations can contribute to the formation of collective memory, we asked participants to study stories and to recall them individually (pregroup recollection), then as a group (group recounting), and then once again individually (postgroup recollection}). One way that postgroup collective memories can be formed under these circumstances is if unshared pregroup recollections in the group recounting influences others’ postgroup recollections. In the present research, we explored (using tests of recall and recognition) whether the presence of a dominant narrator can facilitate the emergence of unshared pregroup recollections in a group recounting and whether this emergence is associated with changes in postgroup recollections. We argue that the formation of a collective memory through conversation is not inevitable but is limited by cognitive factors, such as conditions for social contagion, and by situational factors, such as the presence of a narrator.

Is Memory in the Brain? Remembering as Social Behavior.

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Implicit contributions of context to recognition.

Studies of the impact of context on remembering have not focused on the influence of contextual contingency on subsequent recognition in the condition in which the contingency cannot be verbalized. In two experiments, we analyzed the effect of an implicitly encoded position contingency involving location and semantic category on both hit and false alarm recognition judgments after 1 day and 1 week delays. We vigorously probed for what participants could say about the contingency. We found context effects for both hits and false alarms, whether or not participants could verbalize any knowledge they might have of contingency. These results suggest that people may use contextual information when making a recognition judgment even if they are not aware of this information.

Memory for how one learned of multiple deaths from AIDS: Repeated exposure and distinctiveness

Studies of memories for the circumstances in which an emotional event was learned of have generally explored isolated, single-occurrence events—for example, the Kennedy assassination. Such factors as the event’s distinctiveness, its personal importance, its surprise, the elicited emotional change, and overt rehearsal have been posited as predictors of the memory’s vividness and elaborateness. We examined whether these predictor variables would apply to a repeated trauma, using the repeated nature of the trauma to test, in particular, the contribution of distinctiveness. Focusing on the multiple deaths of loved ones from AIDS that many gay men have experienced, we contrasted the vividness and elaborateness of the circumstantial memory of the first death encountered with that of the most recent death, treating distinctiveness as the number of intervening deaths. In an analysis of responses by 80 gay men to a survey, no support was found for the claim that distinctiveness predicts a circumstantial memory’s vividness or elaborateness. Only emotional change predicted these characteristics of the memories.

Erratum to: Memory for how one learned of multiple deaths from AIDS: Repeated exposure and distinctiveness

Studies of memories for the circumstances in which an emotional event was learned of have generally explored isolated, single-occurrence events--for example, the Kennedy assassination. Such factors as the events distinctiveness, its personal importance, its surprise, the elicited emotional change, and overt rehearsal have been posited as predictors of the memorys vividness and elaborateness. We examined whether these predictor variables would apply to a repeated trauma, using the repeated nature of the trauma to test, in particular, the contribution of distinctiveness. Focusing on the multiple deaths of loved ones from AIDS that many gay men have experienced, we contrasted the vividness and elaborateness of the circumstantial memory of the first death encountered with that of the most recent death, treating distinctiveness as the number of intervening deaths. In an analysis of responses by 80 gay men to a survey, no support was found for the claim that distinctiveness predicts a circumstantial memorys vividness or elaborateness. Only emotional change predicted these characteristics of the memories.