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

本研究的总体目标是开展概念验证研究，研究与个人学习相关的过程如何有助于理解社区/群体中与集体记忆的获取和维持相关的动态。这些记忆作为个人身份、信仰和行为的基础。尽管集体记忆很重要，但由于概念和技术上的挑战，关于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是动态变化的，这使得它们的测量变得复杂。其次，现实世界的社区通常比在实验室环境中研究的小团体要大。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，旨在为在实验室创建的网络社区中对集体记忆形成的实证探索奠定基础。他们将建立在学习心理学研究的基础上，根据该研究，一旦信息被编码，它的记忆就不会被密封；相反，它经历了一个包含大量学习过程的转变，包括强化、抑制、分化和衰退。在此过程中，该项目将通过提供一个实验框架，在与个人层面的学习相关的成熟认知机制和社区层面的大规模社会结果（即集体记忆）之间架起桥梁，为学习的基础科学做出贡献。最终，这些发现将揭示心理学中广泛探索的学习原则是如何减弱和促进集体记忆的形成的。对于有意向公众传播准确信息的公共卫生官员、旨在最大限度地在课堂上获取知识的教育工作者以及有意通过战略性地影响其成员之间的信息共享程度来促进最佳协调的组织来说，本项目将取得的进展都将是有益的。该项目运用认知心理学、社会心理学和网络科学的见解来探索在实验室创造的社区中集体记忆的形成。它将两股相关研究交织在一起：(1)基于实验的关于交流对学习和记忆影响的心理学研究；(2)通过社交网络传播影响力的研究。通过整合不同分析层次的相关研究，这种跨学科的融合成为可能：将个体认知和记忆联系起来，然后建立二元水平的互动如何改变记忆表征，然后研究这些二元水平的影响如何通过社会网络传播。实验室创建的由20名成员组成的社区将被聚集在一起，每个人将根据网络对话的顺序相互交流。这些自由流动的交互将在SoPHIE（人类交互实验软件平台）中以计算机为媒介的方式进行，这是一个由PI为本研究计划开发的具有功能的软件平台。重点将放在对话如何：(a)加强和诱导社区成员先前存在的个人记忆的遗忘，以及(b)对话如何促进新信息的学习。分析将揭示对话记忆之后的记忆更新如何限制整个社区集体记忆的形成。这个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的社会结果之间提供桥梁的有意义的转变。它将对有兴趣探索涉及学习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，以及想要了解认知如何与社会网络的结构特征相互作用以形成集体层面结果的社会学家产生影响。

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.