Collaborative Memory: What Happens With Remote Communication?

Abstract: Information and communication technologies have profoundly changed the way people daily remember and discuss opinions and information while interacting and collaborating with common everyday activities such as working, teaching, and studying. Indeed, the rise of Internet connectivity and rapidly expanding social media platforms raises new questions about how false and true memories spread across social connections and is critical to further understanding everyday human memory functioning. Here, we adopted a classic collaborative memory paradigm and investigated memory performance across two different experimental conditions: in-person and computer-mediated communication via video calls on Teams to evaluate the effects of remote collaboration on memory recall. Results showed that individuals who collaborated in presence and individuals who collaborated via computer had comparable memory performance when communication was enriched with verbal and nonverbal cues.