We often remember in the company of others. In particular, we routinely collaborate with friends, family, or colleagues to remember shared experiences. But surprisingly, in the experimental collaborative recall paradigm, collaborative groups remember less than their potential, an effect termed collaborative inhibition. Rajaram and Pereira-Pasarin (2010) argued that the effects of collaboration on recall are determined by “pre-collaborative” factors. We studied the role of 2 pre-collaborative factors—shared encoding and group relationship—in determining the costs and benefits of collaborative (...) class='Hi'>recall. In Experiment 1, we compared groups of strangers who encoded alone versus together, before collaborating to recall. In Experiment 2, we compared groups of friends who encoded alone versus together, before collaborating to recall. We found that shared encoding abolished collaborative inhibition in both Experiments 1 and 2. But prior relationship did not influence collaborative inhibition over and above the effects of shared encoding. Regardless of encoding condition, collaborative group recall contained fewer intrusions than nominal group recall, and these benefits continued in subsequent individual recall. Our findings demonstrate that pre-collaborative factors—specifically shared encoding—have flow-on benefits for group and individual recall amount, but not recall accuracy. We discuss these findings in terms of self- and cross-cuing in collaborative recall. (shrink)

The present study examined forgetting and recovery of narrative passages varying in emotional intensity, using what we refer to as the “dropout” method. Previous studies of this dropout procedure have used word lists as to-be-remembered material, but the present experiments used brief story vignettes with one-word titles . These vignettes showed a strong dropout forgetting effect in free recall. Both text and picture cues from the vignettes eliminated the forgetting effect on a subsequent cued recall test. Vignette-related (...) pictures in an incidental picture naming task, however, triggered little recovery of initially forgotten vignettes, as shown on a post-test. The results extend findings of large forgetting and memory recovery effects to materials that are more naturalistic than word lists. The findings also show that picture cues, which trigger strong memory recovery effects on a direct test of memory, had little effect on recovery when cues were encountered incidentally. (shrink)

The current study examined the effects of cuing autobiographical memory retrieval in 12 older participants with dementia through immersion into a historically authentic environment that recreated the material and cultural context of the participants’ youth. Participants conversed in either an everyday setting or a museum setting furnished in early twentieth century style while being presented with condition matched cues. Conversations were coded for memory content based on an adapted version of Levine, Svoboda, Hay, Winocur, and Moscovitch coding scheme. More autobiographical (...) memories were recalled in the museum setting, and these memories were more elaborated, more spontaneous and included especially more internal details compared to memories in the control condition. The findings have theoretical and practical implications by showing that the memories retrieved in the museum setting were both quantitatively and qualitatively different from memories retrieved during a control condition. (shrink)

Biography of Tran Duc Thao, 1917-1993, a Vietnamese philosopher.

On theoretical aspects in literary writing.