Your Place or Mine: Transactive Memory

This might be difficult to simulate because you're going to need a partner. Go find someone that you know incredibly well, and ask yourselves the following questions:

1. What did you do on Friday, May 1, 2015?
2. What is the last movie that you saw in a theater? Did you go with someone? If so, who was it? Who was the lead actor/actress? Who directed the movie?
3. During your last vacation, did you go out to eat? Where did you go? What did you have? 

How did you do? Were you able to answer some (or all) of the questions? What it difficult? When you got stuck, what strategy did you use to locate the missing information? Did you consult an external memory source (like a calendar or email) or another person (i.e., your partner)? Was that resource helpful? In what way?

What was the name of that restaurant...?

When a new memory is stored, it becomes embedded in a wider memorial context, which we called a semantic network. When that particular memory is needed, we rely on that context because it provides us with various routes to retrieve the memory. Retrieval, as you may recall, comes in two flavors: cued vs. free recall. Based on your own experience, you've probably found that free recall is much more difficult than cued recall because there aren't any hints. You have to completely rely on your retrieval system to locate the memory. Cued recall is a little easier because the clue in the environment helps activate one of those retrieval paths.

As it turns out, people tend to be great cues for each other! It's fun to observe people cue each other while trying to recall a memory that eludes both parties. Couples and siblings are really great at this because they have so much shared history (i.e., common ground). In addition, they know what the other person knows [1]. For example, suppose I am trying to remember "the name of that movie Valeria Golino was in." My wife might say, "She was in something with Dustin Hoffman," which cues my recall of the movie Rain Man. Neither one of us knew the answer. But though our conversation, the title of the movie emerges. Exploiting the shared nature of memory is called transactive memory. 

A transactive memory system is where two or more people, each with their own memory systems, interact and communicate [2]. The interaction between the memory systems opens the possibility to the encoding, storage, and retrieval of a collaborative memory. In other words, it would be extremely difficult to say exactly where the memory "resides." Instead, the memory is distributed between people. You could also say it emerges from the interaction between people.

The STEM Connection

The educational implications of transactive memory are extremely interesting. Suppose you give your students a group assignment, where the students have to answer the following question: What are the environmental, social, and ethical impacts of selling a McDonald's BigMac? Like most groups, they will probably break down the task so that each person becomes an expert in one area. One student will investigate the environmental impact of buying beef at a large scale and then distributing it to a world-wide network of restaurants. Another student will take the social angle and research the impact of working for minimum wage. The third student will try to investigate if the business practices of a large, multinational corporation are ethically ambiguous.

Who knows the answer to the original question? It isn't clear who knows the answer. Maybe nobody knows. Instead, it is distributed across the students. If one student attempts to remember some part of their research, and looks to her teammates for help, then we are into the land of transactive memory.

Obviously, this has implications for assessment. Is it a requirement that each student knows the complete answer to all three parts of the question? Or is it sufficient that they know the answer at the group level? In other words, can you give them a group assessment or a transactive memory test?

These are interesting and important questions because many careers require that the individual operate in a collaborative team. Each team member may not know all of the answers. But they know who to query when they have a question. They can also help each other remember the decisions that they made at team meetings. 

Transactive memory is a fun and interesting concept. Next time you go out with a good friends, a sibling, or your significant other, keep an eye out for the distributed nature of our memory. It's really cool to observe because, collectively, we know an insane amount of information!


Share and Enjoy!

Dr. Bob

For More Information

[1] The idea of knowing what another person knows (or doesn't know) is called theory of mind. 

[2] Wegner, D. M. (1987). Transactive memory: A contemporary analysis of the group mind. In Theories of group behavior (pp. 185-208). Springer New York.