Couples as socially distributed cognitive systems: Remembering in everyday social and material contexts

Abstract

In everyday life remembering occurs within social contexts, and theories from a number of disciplines predict cognitive and social benefits of shared remembering. Recent debates have revolved around the possibility that cognition can be distributed across individuals and material resources, as well as across groups of individuals. We review evidence from a maturing program of empirical research in which we adopted the lens of distributed cognition to gain new insights into the ways that remembering might be shared in groups. Across four studies, we examined shared remembering in intimate couples. We studied their collaboration on more simple memory tasks as well as their conversations about shared past experiences. We also asked them about their everyday memory compensation strategies in order to investigate the complex ways that couples may coordinate their material and interpersonal resources. We discuss our research in terms of the costs and benefits of shared remembering, features of the group and features of the remembering task that influence the outcomes of shared remembering, the cognitive and interpersonal functions of shared remembering, and the interaction between social and material resources. More broadly, this interdisciplinary research program suggests the potential for empirical psychology research to contribute to ongoing interdisciplinary discussions of distributed cognition.

Content, Control and Display: The Natural Origins of Content

“…John Sutton discuses research on Bdistributed memory^. Long-term couples can often recount narratives of their shared past in interaction, providing one another with triggers, prompts, cues; narratives that they cannot provide alone Harris et al 2014). As a couple they have a narrative of their shared past on which they can act; without one another, essential elements are missing or inaccessible.…”

Distributed cognition in home environments : The prospective memory and cognitive practices of older adults

“…Who (in terms of age and gender) is using specific memory aids? For instance, studies show that: women report a more frequent use of external strategies than men do (Dixon, de Frias, & Bäckman, 2001;Harris, 1980), older adults report greater use of external memory aids than younger adults do (Bolla, Lindgren, Bonaccoray, & Bleecker, 1991;Bouazzaoui et al, 2010;Cavanaugh, Grady, & Perlmutter, 1983;Dixon & Hultsch, 1983;Loewen, Shaw, & Craik, 1990;Moscovitch, 1982;Schryer & Ross, 2013, see Ponds & Jolles, 1996 for an exception); external memory strategies are, across all adult ages, self-reportedly more common than internal strategies (Garrett, Grady, & Hasher, 2010;Harris, Barnier, Sutton, & Keil, 2014;IntonsPeterson & Fournier, 1986;Lovelace & Twohig, 1990, again see Ponds & Jolles, 1996 for an exception), perhaps because they are easier to report on, or perhaps simply because there are more external than internal aids to report.…”

“…This is a vast area, but one study that looked specifically at older adults is Harris, Barnier, Sutton, and Keil (2014, Harris et al (2011) propose that the willingness to cue is itself an important contributor to successful collaborative remembering.…”

“…In previous memory studies, this type of redundancy has been observed for communication practices in families. See, for instance, Wu et al, 2008, which describes how iterations of similar information across different media can prove beneficial for the remembering process in a family, or Harris et al (2014), which notes that repetition in a communicative remembering process within couples is a positive factor for collaborative remembering. However, it is not usually considered in relation to the physical environment.…”

“…Principles such as information hubs and bandwidth can be seen and exploited in physical structures. In other words, when using a distributed perspective there is often nothing special about social distribution in terms of principles of information flow, despite the fact that there can be special aspects of social interaction (as, for instance, was noted in the study by Harris et al (2014) described above). In many of the above examples the social distribution is also mediated by technological means.…”