Transactive Memory Reconstructed: Rethinking Wegner's Research Program

Abstract

In this paper, I argue that recent research on episodic memory supports a limited defense of the phenomena that Daniel Wegner has termed transactive memory. Building on psychological and neurological research, targeting both individual and shared memory, I argue that individuals can collaboratively work to construct shared episodic memories. In some cases, this yields memories that are distributed across multiple individuals instead of being housed in individual brains.

Extended emotions

“…When users engage with these external devices, the integration of internal and external resources working together enables them to realize augmented forms of memory the brain simply cannot achieve on its own. Similar benefits are can be found in the social world—for example, when individuals off‐load some processes of recall onto others and groups collectively pool their resources to construct shared episodic memories (Harris, Barnier, Sutton, & Keil, ; Huebner, ).…”

What Is Minimally Cooperative Behavior?

“…The nature of the groups at issue in collective memory research varies significantly, with some researchers, especially those based in the social sciences, investigating remembering in groups composed of very large numbers of widely dispersed individuals, including whole nations and societies (see Barash 2017;Olick et al 2011), while others, especially those based in psychology, investigate remembering in groups comprising much smaller numbers of more intensely interacting individuals, such as mother-child dyads and married couples. We will have something to say here about both large-scale and small-scale groups, but, reflecting a tendency in recent philosophy of memory (e.g., Theiner 2013;Huebner 2016;Kirchhoff 2016) to build on the results of empirical research on transactive memory (see Ren and Argote 2011 for an overview), our interest is primarily in groups of the latter sort.…”

Lessons and new directions for extended cognition from social and personality psychology

“…But even if the argument from the previous section falls short, my claims in this section about the potentially shared resources between social and personality psychology and extended cognition need not fall with it. I want to begin by noting that the proposal I'm making is already, in a sense, underway with respect to the recent interest in Transactive Memory Systems (TMS) among friends of extended cognition (e.g., Harris, Keil, Sutton, Barnier, & McIlwain, 2011;Huebner, 2016;Kirchhoff, 2015;Sutton et al, 2010;Theiner, 2013;Tollefsen, Dale, & Paxton, 2013).…”

“…It is important to note that these models are all elaborated in the context of research on expectancy confirmation effects, more colloquially known as self-fulfilling prophecies. My claim is that the interactions modeled in this research program will reliably exemplify the sort of feedback described by Palermos (2014), Heersmink (2015), Huebner (2016), and others.…”