EAGER: Societies as learning communities: building the foundations for an empirical approach to the formation of collective memories

拟议工作的总体目标是进行概念验证研究，以了解与个人学习相关的过程如何有助于理解与社区/群体集体记忆的获取和维护相关的动态。这些记忆是个人身份、信仰和行为的基础。 尽管它们很重要，但由于概念和技术上的挑战，对集体记忆如何形成的实验研究有限。 首先，这些记忆在个体之间的互动中动态变化，这使得它们的测量变得复杂。其次，现实世界的社区通常比实验室环境中研究的小群体要大。在这个项目中，来自普林斯顿大学的研究员Alin Coman和他的研究团队旨在为实验室创建的网络社区中集体记忆形成的实证探索奠定基础。他们将建立在学习的心理学研究基础上，根据该研究，一旦信息被编码，它的记忆就不会被密封;相反，它经历了一个转变，涉及学习的许多过程，包括加强，抑制，分化和衰退。在这样做的过程中，该项目将通过提供一个实验框架来促进学习的基础科学，该框架将与个人层面的学习相关的成熟认知机制与社区层面的大规模社会成果（即，集体记忆）。最终，研究结果将揭示在心理学中广泛探索的学习原则如何减弱和促进集体记忆的形成。从这个项目将取得的进展将感兴趣的公共卫生官员传播准确的信息给公众，教育工作者谁的目标是最大限度地提高知识获取在他们的课堂上，并有兴趣促进最佳协调的组织通过战略影响其成员之间的信息共享的程度。该项目使用认知心理学，社会心理学和网络科学的见解来探索实验室创建的社区中集体记忆的形成。它将两种相关研究交织在一起：（1）基于实验的心理学研究，即交流对学习和记忆的影响;（2）通过社交网络传播影响的研究。通过整合不同层次的相关研究，这种跨学科的发展成为可能：将个体认知和记忆联系起来，然后建立二元层次的相互作用如何改变记忆表征，然后调查这些二元层次的影响如何通过社交网络传播。实验室创建的20名成员的社区将被组装，其中个人将根据一系列网络对话相互交流。这些自由流动的交互将在SoPHIE（人类交互实验软件平台）中以计算机介导的方式进行，SoPHIE是PI为本研究项目开发的一种软件平台。重点将放在对话如何：（a）加强和诱发社区成员先前存在的个人记忆的遗忘，以及（B）对话如何促进学习新信息。分析将揭示对话记忆后的记忆更新如何限制整个社区集体记忆的形成。该研究项目构成了跨学科方法如何在个人层面的认知现象和大规模社会结果之间架起桥梁的有意义的转变。它将向那些有兴趣探索学习中涉及的认知过程如何在集体层面上具有涌现特性的认知科学家，以及那些想了解认知如何与社交网络的结构特征相互作用以塑造集体层面结果的社会学家。

The overarching goal of the proposed work is to conduct proof-of-concept studies for how processes associated with individual learning can contribute to understanding the dynamics associated with the acquisition and maintenance of collective memories in communities/groups. These memories serve as a foundation on which individuals base their identities, beliefs, and behaviors. Despite their importance, there is limited experimental research into how collective memories are formed because of conceptual and technical challenges. First, these memories are dynamically changed in interactions among individuals, which makes their measurement complex. Second, real-world communities are typically larger than the small groups one could study in lab settings. In this project, investigator Alin Coman and his research team, from Princeton University, aim to build the foundation for the empirical exploration of the formation of collective memories in lab-created networked communities. They will build on psychological research on learning according to which once information is encoded, its memory is not sealed; rather, it experiences a transformation that involves a multitude of processes underlying learning, including strengthening, suppression, differentiation, and decay. In doing so, the project will contribute to the basic science of learning by providing an experimental framework that bridges between well-established cognitive mechanisms associated with learning at an individual level and large-scale social outcomes at a community level (i.e., collective memory). Ultimately, the findings will reveal how learning principles widely explored in psychology attenuate and facilitate the formation of collective memories. The advances that will be made from this project will be of interest to public health officials interested in disseminating accurate information to the public, to educators who aim to maximize knowledge acquisition in their classrooms, and to organizations interested in facilitating optimal coordination by strategically impacting the degree of information sharing among its members. This project uses insights from cognitive psychology, social psychology, and network science to explore the formation of collective memories in lab-created communities. It weaves together two strands of relevant research: (1) experimentally-based psychological research on the effect of communication on learning and memory and (2) studies of the propagation of influence through social networks. This cross-disciplinary fertilization is made possible by integrating relevant research at different levels of analysis: linking individual cognition and memory, then establishing how dyadic-level interaction changes memory representations, and then investigating how these dyadic-level effects propagate through social networks. Lab-created communities of 20 members will be assembled in which individuals will interact with one another according to a sequence of networked conversations. These free-flowing interactions will occur in a computer-mediated fashion in SoPHIE (Software Platform for Human Interaction Experiments), a software platform with features developed by the PI for the purposes of this research program. The focus will be on how conversations: (a) strengthen and induce forgetting in pre-existing individual memories of community members and (b) how they facilitate the learning of new information. Analyses will reveal how memory updating following conversational remembering circumscribes the formation of collective memories across the community. This research program constitutes a meaningful shift in how interdisciplinary approaches offer a bridge between individual-level cognitive phenomena and large-scale social outcomes. It would speak to cognitive scientists interested in exploring how the cognitive processes involved in learning have emergent properties at a collective level, and to sociologists who want to understand how cognition interacts with structural features of social networks to shape collective-level outcomes.