Abstract

Memories serve a variety of different functions. They speak to our identity and let us remember who we are – they direct our actions today and in the future – and they act as social glue and connect us with the people around us. Reaching socially shared representations of the past can be beneficial for the individual, but also for the collective as a whole. This presentation will discuss recent experimental work on positive and negative effects of social interactions on individual memory, and how these effects may jointly contribute to the development of shared memories in social groups. Honing in on cognitive mechanisms as well as the phenomenology of remembering, a special focus will be given to analysis of source monitoring performance as well as remember/know judgments.