In everyday life remembering occurs within social contexts, and theories from a number of disciplines predict cognitive and social benefits of shared remembering. Recent debates have revolved around the possibility that cognition can be distributed across individuals and material resources, as well as across groups of individuals. We review evidence from a maturing program of empirical research in which we adopted the lens of distributed cognition to gain new insights into the ways that remembering might be shared in groups. Across four studies, we examined shared remembering in intimate couples. We studied their collaboration on more simple memory tasks as well as their conversations about shared past experiences. We also asked them about their everyday memory compensation strategies in order to investigate the complex ways that couples may coordinate their material and interpersonal resources. We discuss our research in terms of the costs and benefits of shared remembering, features of the group and features of the remembering task that influence the outcomes of shared remembering, the cognitive and interpersonal functions of shared remembering, and the interaction between social and material resources. More broadly, this interdisciplinary research program suggests the potential for empirical psychology research to contribute to ongoing interdisciplinary discussions of distributed cognition.

This inspired them to depart from testing memory for lists of words and events, and to explore the amount of rich, in-depth information remembered by couples about experienced events. They found these social exchanges led to clear collaborative memory benefits, which could take three forms:

“New information” such as finally snatching an elusive name of a musical thanks to a chain of prompts between the two parties. Richer, more vivid descriptions of events including sensory information. Information from one partner painting things in a new light for the other.

Differences between the couples were crucial. Those who structured their approach together and were more prepared to riff off the other's contributions did better than those who were more passive or critical. Richer events were also better remembered by partners who rated their intimacy as higher.

The authors note that older adults tend to experience the greatest memory difficulties with first-hand autobiographical information, rather than abstracted facts. This is exactly where the couples gained the biggest benefit from remembering together, as evidenced by performance on the in-depth event recall task and the spontaneously emerging anecdotes. It's possible that as we grow older, we offset the unreliability of our own episodic systems by drawing on the memorial support offered by a trusted partner. This might explain why when one member of an older couple experiences a drop in cognitive function, the other soon follows. Our memory systems are more of a shared resource than we realise.