Contextualizing Human Memory ─ An Interdisciplinary Approach to Understanding How Individuals and Groups Remember the Past

This edited collection provides an inter- and intra-disciplinary discussion of the critical role context plays in how and when individuals and groups remember the past. International contributors integrate key research from a range of disciplines, including social and cognitive psychology, discursive psychology, philosophy/philosophical psychology and cognitive linguistics, to increase awareness of the central role that cultural, social and technological contexts play in determining individual and collective recollections at multiple, yet interconnected, levels of human experience.

Divided into three parts, cognitive and psychological perspectives, social and cultural perspectives, and cognitive linguistics and philosophical perspectives, Stone and Bietti present a breadth of research on memory in context. Topics covered include:

• the construction of self-identity in memory

• flashbulb memories

• scaffolding memory

• the cultural psychology of remembering

• social aspects of memory

• the mnemonic consequences of silence

• emotion and memory

• eyewitness identification

• multimodal communication and collective remembering.

Contextualizing Human Memory allows researchers to understand the variety of work undertaken in related fields, and to appreciate the importance of context in understanding when, how and what is remembered at any given recollection. The book will appeal to researchers, academics and postgraduate students in the fields of cognitive and social psychology, as well as those in related disciplines interested in learning more about the advancing field of memory studies.

Charles B. Stone received his PhD at the Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science in Sydney, Australia and is now a Louvain University Academia (AUL) and Marie Curie Actions of the European Union Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Universite catholique de Louvain in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium.

Lucas Bietti is an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI) in Essen, Germany and a visiting scholar at the Amsterdam Gesture Center at VU University Amsterdam. In his current project, he explores how small groups jointly reconstruct collective memories of shared experiences in multimodal interactions.