2 results
11 - Remembering as communication: A family recounts its past
- Edited by David C. Rubin, Duke University, North Carolina
-
- Book:
- Remembering our Past
- Published online:
- 14 October 2009
- Print publication:
- 26 January 1996, pp 271-290
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Remembering can be viewed as an act of communication. People remember their life stories by writing autobiographies, conversing with relatives, friends, and strangers, or even by talking to themselves. Their autobiographical memories emerge out of these varying forms of discourse. We cannot divorce the act of remembering from the act of communicating, nor can we treat an autobiographical memory as something distinct from the discourse itself. Recollections arise not from the depths of a storehouse in the head, but from a desire to communicate with others about the personal past. What is remembered and how it is remembered are functions of the resulting discourse. People remember the same episode differently when writing an autobiography, speaking to a group of strangers, reminiscing with a close friend, or conducting an internal dialogue (see Barclay, this volume; Pillemer, Krensky, Kleinman, Goldsmith, & White, 1991; Pillemer, Rhinehart, & White, 1986; Robinson, this volume; Tenney, 1989). The social conventions of autobiographical writing or speaking, the role of the audience, ordinary language assumptions, the embeddedness of meaning in context, the social interactions between speaker and audience – all shape the form and as well as the content of remembering. Othello reports that Desdemona's father “questioned me the story of my life,” but the story Othello remembered and told to the father was surely not so “passing strange” and “wondrous pitiful” as the tale that provoked in Desdemona a “world of sighs.”
5 - Opening vistas for cognitive psychology
-
- By William Hirst, New School for Social Research, David Manier, New School for Social Research
- Edited by Laura Martin, Arizona Museum of Science and Technology, Katherine Nelson, City University of New York, Ethel Tobach
-
- Book:
- Sociocultural Psychology
- Published online:
- 05 November 2011
- Print publication:
- 29 September 1995, pp 89-124
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Sometimes we can be too smart in seeking the solution to a problem, outwitting ourselves with our own cleverness. Prompted by the light of our reasoning, we find our way as if to a smartly appointed room. Here we become surprisingly comfortable, and the artificial brightness of the internal logic we have pursued nearly convinces us the room is illuminated by the problem we set out after. As often as not, our journey ends here. Yet in reality we have been led astray: Ours is a stuffy, windowless room, shut off from the “real world” – a reclusive chamber of our own construction. Over the last few years, the authors of this essay, like several other scholars (e.g., Neisser 1992; Scribner 1984; Bruner 1990), have reluctantly come to the conclusion that the branch of psychology in which we have labored, the one responsible for the study of cognition, may have cleverly constructed and be happily residing in just such an artificial enclave, cut off from the still unresolved problems that originally inspired it. In short, we have concluded that cognitive psychology now confronts an impasse. This chapter will outline the dimensions of this impasse and suggest ways to surmount it.
As cognitive psychologists, we hesitantly come to this conclusion in part out of frustration at our inability to offer satisfactory responses to the persistent queries of friends and relatives. Our area of expertise is memory, and friends and relatives often ask us why they have such poor memories, or why they have trouble remembering names, facts, appointments, or the details of their children's school lives.