LEARNING, MEMORY AND COGNITION

Learning, Memory and Cognition

Learning Memory and Cognition

Introduction

People often form and retrieve memories in the company of others. Yet, nearly 125 years of cognitive research on learning and memory has mainly focused on individuals working in isolation (Anderson, 2003). Although important topics such as eyewitness memory and autobiographical memory have evaluated social influences, a study of group memory has progressed mainly within the provinces of history, anthropology, sociology, and social psychology. In this context, the recent surge in research on the cognitive basis of collaborative memory marks an important conceptual departure. Effects of collaboration are counterintuitive because individuals remember less when recalling in groups.

Collaboration can also lead to forgetting and increase memory errors. Conversely, collaboration can also improve memory under proper conditions. People often form and retrieve memories in the company of others. Yet, 125 years of cognitive research since Ebbinghaus's seminal work on learning and memory has mainly focused on individuals working alone in isolation. In this context, there has been an important shift in this orientation in the past decade as memory researchers have started to explore cognitive mechanisms that affect group memory and the effects of group processes on later individual memory termed this newly emerging topic in cognitive psychology collaborative memory.

Discussion and Analysis

Benefits of Collaborative Memory

Re-exposure effects

Collaboration provides re-exposure to the study material; listening to other group members' output provides a second study opportunity and should therefore improve learning. These re-exposure benefits cannot be evident during group recall; however, they can be detected on a subsequent memory test, and they may be one of the main reasons why collaboration intuitively seems beneficial. Findings for a variety of study stimuli (that do not promote memory errors) show that veridical memory increases if collaboration precedes individual retrieval. The benefits of past collaboration have been also observed in older adults and on later individual tests of cued recall and recognition. This positive cascade shows that collaboration provides re-exposure benefits above the benefits of hypermnesia (Andersson, Helstrup, Ronnberg, 2007).

Re-exposure benefits of collaboration have important educational implications for group learning practices. A key question then is how the re-exposure benefits of collaboration may be enhanced. The recent findings show that study-test conditions that simultaneously strengthen and stabilize retrieval strategies and provide re-exposure opportunities are the best for enhancing later individual memory.

Relearning through retrieval

Collaboration can also produce powerful effects on eventual individual learning by enabling rehearsal of study information. This is because the act of recalling during collaboration provides an opportunity to rehearse already known information. This process is similar to repeatedly retrieving studied information on one's own and, as such, not a uniquely collaborative effect. However, because collaboration affords, and to some extent ensures, such rehearsal through retrieval, it is important to assess the effects of this mechanism separately to clearly understand the distinct processes that combine to produce collaboration effects. For instance, considerable research on individual memory shows that repeated retrieval (that amounts to rehearsal) is more powerful than repeated study for improving long-term ...