Psychonomic Society 2025 Annual Meeting: Thursday Recap

Dynamic. Storyteller. Inspiring.

Respectful. Respected.

Keynote Address: "The Cognition of Social Remembering: Implications for Individual and Collective Memory"

Suparna Rajaram, Stony Brook University, USA

Summary By Heather Manitzas Hill

These are just a few of the descriptors that could be applied to Dr. Rajaram, Keynote Address for the opening of the 66th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society.

The keynote address began with a poignant introduction by an almost life-long friend, women-in-science partner-in-crime, and long-time collaborator, Dr. Judith Kroll of the University of California, Irvine. In her opening remarks, Dr. Kroll shared the many accolades of Dr. Rajaram’s distinguished career. However, the two messages that stood out most to me in her introduction were the joy of sharing in science as part of a team and a special message to early-career scientists: always remember “to participate in every possible way.” As Dr. Kroll noted in a previous Dr. Rajaram-ism, “Science is not a spectator sport.”

Dr. Rajaram has clearly lived by these nuggets of insight. Her very successful career in cognitive science, mentorship of graduate and undergraduate students, publications, journal editing, governance, and engagement with many different types of organizations, in addition to a very productive research record, demonstrates these mantras.

Through a very humble acknowledgment of her collaborators and mentors throughout her prestigious career, Dr. Rajaram took a standing-room-only audience on a rich journey, filled with twists and turns, as she and her teams worked to uncover the mysteries of social memory.

She started our journey with a walk down memory lane through some of the giants of memory research, including Ebbinghaus and Bartlett, whose foundations inspired her work on understanding memory as a social process. From this brief history lesson, Dr. Rajaram then turned to defining specific cognitive mechanisms that might influence or underlie the idea of collective memory. The emergence of shared knowledge from one’s community, culture, and small groups.

Dr. Rajaram presented a fascinating series of studies in which she and her collaborators examined specific mechanisms in contexts that provided experimental control within “real-world” settings – working in groups in laboratory settings or observing students taking tests, the best college “lab rat.”

Several key conclusions emerged from her keynote address, which were summarized very nicely on one of her slides: 1. Collaborative recall (working with others, even strangers on one occasion) impairs memory by both disrupting what you were trying to retain and inhibiting what you might have processed originally. 2. Funny enough, collaborative recall also improves memory, especially when you mix folks up a bit. 3. Collaboration on memory involves multiple cognitive processes (that can be studied with rigor even in the complex, real world. 4. When collaboration synchronizes memory, collective memory is formed.

One final key memory for me, as it aligns very nicely with my tendency to continuously retell stories as a way to work through different facets of a problem, is that sharing recollections of personal events repeatedly reduces the overall negativity associated with those events, suggesting that storytelling and recollections may be important in emotion regulation.

Thus, as Dr. Rajaram said to me when I asked her to share one take-home message she hoped we would walk away with from her talk, we must somehow continue to work on integrating rigorous, controlled science into the messiness of life. Here’s to a great start to “peak” our cognition over the next three days.