Transactive Memory

Abstract

Transactive memory (TM) theory describes how two or more people come together to develop a collective memory. TM theory explains the ways in which people collectively and collaboratively encode, store, and retrieve information as a system. In its simplest form, a TM system is made up of two people, their perceptions of who knows what, and the communication between them. Behaving as a system, the team can collectively store more information than the people can individually store, and the team members can leverage each other's knowledge for more effective decision making.

Human-AI teaming: leveraging transactive memory and speaking up for enhanced team effectiveness

“…Tapping into and sharing distributed group knowledge is key for adequate hypothesis-building and decision-making in teams (Palazzolo, 2017), but can be challenging, particularly in diverse and/ or hierarchical teams (Ren and Argote, 2011). Furthermore, group members tend to exchange more "shared" (i.e., known by all members) than "unique" (i.e., known only to individual group members) knowledge, which gets further strengthened via confirmation by others in some kind of a vicious circle (Stasser and Titus, 1985;Lewis and Herndon, 2011;Boos et al, 2013).…”