John Sutton on “The Wisconsin moment: embodied interaction in collaborative recall experiments”

‘Collaborative inhibition’ is the surprising result of many lab experiments on remembering together: a group typically remembers less than or worse than the same number of people would if working alone, then pooling their memories. Recent work has complicated this tradition, showing that established groups with shared histories – like long-standing couples – can benefit from interacting to remember things that matter to them, and examining the strategies and micro-processes such as cross-cuing that ground collaborative facilitation. But it is hard to tap the thicker contexts of everyday joint reminiscence in realistic settings. We report a preliminary ethnographic study of our own collaborative recall experiments with older couples. Working outwards from one specific strategic disagreement between participants, we examine embodied, affective, and spatial dimensions of the experimental scenario, considering challenges of measurement and method in psychology.

John Sutton (Macquarie University) (joint work with Kath Bicknell and Celia Harris)

To join the session on Zoom, please get in touch with Gloria Andrada de Gregorio at gandrada@fcsh.unl.pt for the details.

This event is part of the ArgLab Research Colloquium organised by Maria Grazia Rossi, Giulia Terzian and Gloria Andrada at the Laboratory of Argumentation, Cognition and Language of the NOVA Institute of Philosophy. For any inquiries, please contact Maria Grazia, Giulia, or Gloria.