Transactive Memory - History

History

Transactive memory was first envisioned by Daniel Wegner in 1985. This concept proposed that when two individuals spend a lot of time around each other and working together, they create a shared store of knowledge between the members. In essence, one member of the couple could store information within their partner and then recall that information by asking their partner about it. This concept was different and unique from other descriptions of socially distributed cognition in that it describes a situation where individuals hold different knowledge compared to shared information, and members of the group engage in transactions to assist in recall of the stored information. In a recent review, Ren and Argote described transactive memory as existing of both a structural component (the linkages of individual memory to the collective) and transactive processes that make the transactve memory dynamic. Wegner first proposed these three processes which occur in groups that lead to the formation and reification of transactive memory: encoding, storage, and retrieval described more below. In a series of experiments, Hollingshead found that romantic partners (who are assumed to have transactive memory) performed better on knowledge recall than dyads and that couples will memorize more words in a list than two strangers when they are rewarded on number of unique words you recall. The explanation for these findings are that couples know how best to remind each other of the knowledge they have, and that couples have a good conception of the other’s knowledge and will therefore avoid memorizing words within their partner’s domain. Strangers don’t have access to this same shared information which leads to poorer performance in these kinds of tasks. Transactive memory was further extended by Diane Liang and colleagues into the realm of work groups. In this work, the development of transactive memory was conceived of as a way to improve group’s performance when engaging in interdependent tasks. After this extension, transactive memory became more prolific in organizational behavior among other disciplines.