Psychology 2990A/B Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Transactive Memory, Distributed Knowledge

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 2990A/B
• Professor: Doug Hazelwood

Document Summary

Often individuals work together in groups to encode, store, and recall. Group work is often assigned to students in classroom settings and employees in work settings, which makes clear the importance of understanding how individuals work together to remember and learn. Transactive memory is the knowledge of who knows what in a group, combined with the processes used to encode, store, and communicate that knowledge. You are probably quite aware of whether your friend is an expert with computers or cars or taxes. You would know whether to approach your friend to ask him/her a question about one of these topics or seek that knowledge elsewhere. The following reading by jackson and moreland (2009) explains how transactive memory works in a classroom setting. Groups may be able to process information, just as individuals can. This socially shared cognition, according to larson and christensen (1993), involves the acquisition, storage, transmission, manipulation and use of information by groups.