I can see this - it makes a wee bit of sense. The authors focus in this piece on a review of the empirical research suggesting that social sharing of memories is one of the most mundane examples of distributed cognition.

Below is the introduction to the much longer paper, which can be read at the link in the title.

Memory Studies; 2014: 7(3):285–297
DOI: 10.1177/1750698014530619

Couples as socially distributed cognitive systems: Remembering in everyday social and material contexts

Celia B Harris, Amanda J Barnier, John Sutton. and Paul G Keil

Abstract

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.

Socially distributed remembering: theoretical and empirical background

Remembering the past plays a crucial role in our lives, our identities, our plans, and our social relationships (Harris et al., 2013b), and the fact that we frequently talk about the past with others has important consequences for the way we remember (Campbell, 2003; Harris et al., 2008, 2010; Pasupathi, 2001; Sutton et al., 2010; Weldon, 2000).In the current article, we apply the theoretical framework of distributed cognition (Barnier et al., 2008; Hutchins, 1995; Sutton, 2006) to group remembering. As we have argued elsewhere (Barnier et al., 2008; Sutton et al., 2010), a distributed cognition framework provides explanatory power for complex social memory phenomena; it drives novel research questions, new methods, and empirically testable hypotheses. In the current article, we update this argument by presenting findings from a maturing program of empirical research on shared remembering in couples. 

Distributed cognition: definitions

The distributed cognition framework suggests that cognitive states and processes are sometimes distributed, such that neural and bodily resources couple in coordinated ways with material or social resources to accomplish cognitive tasks (Barnier et al., 2008; Clark, 1997). According to this view, external resources can become parts both of occurrent cognitive processes and of enduring integrated cognitive systems: ‘When parts of the environment are coupled to the brain in the right way, they become parts of the mind’ (Chalmers, 2008: 1; see also Sutton, 2010). This definition begs the question of what the ‘right way’ is for coupling to occur. Clark and Chalmers (1998) pro- posed the following criteria:

1. That the resource be reliably available and typically invoked …
2. That any information thus retrieved be more-or-less automatically endorsed …
3. That information contained in the resource should be easily accessible as and when required. (Clark, 2010: 6–7)

While debate continues to refine these conditions (Sterelny, 2010; Sutton, 2010; Sutton et al., 2010), we can usefully adopt them for the purposes of this exposition, to motivate and test against empirical research.

What kinds of cognitive tasks?

There are three compatible possibilities for the kinds of cognitive tasks that lend themselves to distribution across internal and external resources. First, cognitive distribution might enable the accomplishment of highly complex tasks that cannot be completed by an individual alone, such as navigating a ship (Hutchins, 1995). Second, cognitive distribution might enable individuals to accomplish tasks ‘better’ in some way, or more efficiently, or at least differently and with different outcomes from doing the tasks alone. Third, cognitive distribution might enable the maintenance of capacity to complete everyday tasks (which used to be done alone) as individual cognitive resources decline or fail. For instance, Clark and Chalmers (1998) described a thought experiment regarding ‘Otto’, a man with Alzheimer’s, whose notebook entries have literally become the con-tents of his memory. In observing strikingly similar real-world cases, Dennett (1996) noted that older individuals often ‘load their home environments with ultra-familiar landmarks, triggers for habits … Taking them out of their homes is literally separating them from large parts of their minds’ (see also Dahlbäck et al., 2013; Drayson and Clark, in press).

Socially distributed cognition

Cognitive distribution is arguably an everyday phenomenon, and the examples used to illustrate it are likewise everyday, like the cocktail waiter who relies on the shape of the glasses to remember ingredients in drinks, or an artist using a sketchpad (Clark, 1997; Van Leeuwen et al., 1999). Despite the field’s focus on material resources, distributed cognitive systems are likely to involve both material and social resources (Barnier et al., 2008; Sutton et al., 2010). In the current article, we review empirical research motivated by the view that social sharing of memories is one of the most mundane examples of distributed cognition (see also Barnier et al., 2008; Barnier, 2010).

We focus here on intimate couples remembering together. We have a number of reasons to expect that they are a particularly good example of the kinds of groups in which socially distributed cognition occurs (see also Wu et al., 2008). Adapting Clark and Chalmers’ (1998) criteria for considering objects as part of cognition, Tollefsen (2006) suggested that Person A can be incorporated into Person B’s cognitive processing under the following conditions: (1) if Person A is avail-able and typically invoked; (2) if Person B accepts Person A’s information without question; (3) if Person A is readily accessible by Person B; and (4) if information stored by Person A was endorsed by Person B at some point. Long-married couples who frequently discuss their past and future across their lives may meet these criteria (see also Sutton et al., 2010; Tollefsen, 2006). Put another way, couples are ‘persisting integrated systems’ (cf. Rupert, 2010; see also Wegner, 1987; Wegner et al., 1985).

Making couples the unit of analysis can yield insights not available when studying individuals (see also Hinsz et al., 1997). That is, groups such as couples may exhibit emergence when they remember together; meaning the group product is different from the aggregation of individual memories (see also Theiner, 2013; Theiner and O’Connor, 2010). Such emergence may be positive (such as the generation of new information) or negative (such as the introduction of errors). Wegner’s (1987) Transactive Memory theory predicts benefits of shared remembering as one kind of emergence: ‘group memory structures develop and become capable of memory feats far beyond those that might be accomplished by any individual’ (Wegner, 1995: 319).

Shared remembering in experimental psychology

In cognitive psychology, the collaborative recall paradigm was developed to measure the impact of remembering with others (Weldon and Bellinger, 1997). Using this method, the memory output of a group is compared to the pooled or aggregated (non-redundant) output of the same number of individuals remembering alone (see Basden et al., 2000; Harris et al., 2008; Rajaram and Pereira-Pasarin, 2010). This comparison is useful for considering whether groups show the kind of emergent properties that would be predicted by conceptualising them as distributed cognitive systems, since it indexes whether the recall of a collaborative group is quantitatively different from the sum of its parts.

Collaborative groups reliably remember less than aggregated groups; that is, they show collaborative inhibition. This ‘cost’ of collaboration has been demonstrated for materials such as word lists, stories, pictures and historical facts (see Harris et al., 2008). Typically, groups of strangers are tested (Rajaram and Pereira-Pasarin, 2010), although groups of friends also show collaborative inhibition (Harris et al., 2013a). However, a study by Meade et al. (2009) found that expert pilots, who are trained to communicate efficiently, reversed the typical effect and showed benefits of collaboration – collaborative facilitation – when remembering aviation-relevant information, such that collaborative groups remembered more than aggregated groups.

A handful of studies suggest that intimate couples may also benefit from remembering together. For instance, Ross et al. (2004) found that older couples made fewer memory errors on a shopping list task when they collaborated, whereas Johansson et al. (2005) found that a subset of older couples – those high on division of responsibility and on agreement about expertise – were relatively less impaired by collaboration. However, these studies have not reliably demonstrated the memory facilitation that we might expect, and a number of other studies have failed to find any benefits of shared remembering in couples at all (e.g. Gould et al., 2002).

In our studies, we extended the methodology of the standard collaborative recall paradigm to study shared remembering in its everyday social context. We focused on intimate couples – the kinds of groups who regularly remember together. We also focused on a range of memory tasks, from basic word lists to significant, shared autobiographical events. Finally, we focused on the communication and interaction during collaboration and other differences between couples (e.g. relationship intimacy). We examined whether the benefits of shared remembering, as suggested by a distributed cognition framework, may be identifiable in certain kinds of groups and for certain kinds of memories.

LeveVei - Episode 90: Peer to Peer in Governance, Production and Knowledge Distribution (Michel Bauwens)

This is an older episode of LeveVei with Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation as the guest. I have been a tremendous fan of Bauwens' work for around ten years or so now. Below the introduction to the interview, I have included one of the essays linked to at the end of the post, a personal favorite of mine.

Episode 90: Peer to peer as an approach to governance, production and distribution of knowledge

Posted by James Alexander Arnfinsen (redaktør) × January 6, 2014

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 48:45 — 44.6MB)

In this episode I´m joined by Michel Bauwens, who is the founder of P2P-foundation which works to promote, research and develop different forms of peer to peer practices. He starts out by describing his engagement with civic entrepreneurship, where the P2P-foundation is one example of this kind of relational dynamic. He then explains in detail what peer to peer actually entails, while also placing this trend in a historical context in relation to how people have organized different forms of transaction and value creation.

An interesting point here, regarding work, is how we have moved from a division of labour to the distribution of tasks. Peer to peer implies a very different method of organizing and controlling how people engage in a project or in the production of complex social artifacts (such as Wikipedia and Linux). He also points to how peer to peer production is codependent on the conventional and existing system today, mainly capitalism, and how this new form of organizing value creation is emerging from within the old system while at the same time transcending many of the constraints found in the the old paradigm. An important distinction is the idea of “the commons”, and Bauwens points out that peer to peer production is often organized around some kind of communally shared value where the participants contribute so as to uphold and maintain the common asset (couchsurfing is only one example)

Another interesting point is how peer to peer can create a space for both cooperation and market-based competition. Further on in our conversation Bauwens describes how it´s possible to upscale the relational dynamics of peer to peer and apply it to larger societal change processes. He is currently engaged in a project in Ecuador and he uses this initiative as a case in point, explaining how Ecuador, through peer to peer practices, is trying to move into an open commons based knowledge society. An interesting point here is how knowledge can be understood as an infinite resource, and with the advent of 3D-printing and local micro production facilities, this could have dramatic effects on how a society sustains itself. We also discuss how innovation often will come from the periphery, and not necessarily from the center stage, so maybe Ecuador can play an important role in global change processes? Another theme we bring up is how to understand peer to peer from an integral perspective, with reference to the work of for instance Ken Wilber and Susan Cook-Greuter. A poignent question here circles around if and how peer to peer presuppose higher stages of consciousness? Towards the last section of the interview Bauwens speaks to his hopes for the future development of peer to peer practice.

If you feel inspired or provoked by our conversation feel free to add your comments after the interview. You can also send in a written piece of work and get it published together with this episode. Further details can be found here.

Episode links:

• Michel Bauwens (bio)
• P2P-foundation
• What is an interesting life in the p2p era?, short article by Michel Bauwens
• Defining P2P as the relational dynamic of distributed networks, an informative overview of P2P
• P2P and Human Evolution: Peer to peer as the premise of a new mode of civilization, an extensive essay by Michel Bauwens

Here is an excellent and favorite essay by Bauwens, which is linked to above:

Defining P2P as the relational dynamic of distributed networks

2.1.A. Defining P2P as the relational dynamic of distributed networks

Alexander Galloway in his book Protocol makes an important and clear distinction between centralized networks (with one central hub where everything must pass and be authorized, as in the old telephone switching systems), decentralized systems, with more than one center, but these subcenters still being authorative (such as the airport system in the U.S. centered around hubs where planes must pass through), from distributed systems, where hubs may exist, but are not obligatory (such as the internet). In distributed networks, participants may freely link with each other, they are fully autonomous agents. Hence the importance to clearly distinguish between our usage of the concepts 'decentralized' vs. 'distributed'. Peer to peer is specifically the relational dynamic that arises in distributed networks.

So: what is peer to peer? Here’s a first tentative definition: It is a specific form of relational dynamic, is based on the assumed equipotency of its participants, organized through the free cooperation of equals in view of the performance of a common task, for the creation of a common good, with forms of decision-making and autonomy that are widely distributed throughout the network. This is of course a strong definition and statement, subject to a lot of refining and caveats.

P2P processes are not structureless, but are characterized by dynamic and changing structures which adapt themselves to phase changes. It rules are not derived from an external authority, as in hierarchical systems, but generated from within. It does not deny ‘authority’, but only fixed forced hierarchy, and therefore accepts authority based on expertise, initiation of the project, etc… P2P may be the first true meritocracy. The threshold for participation is kept as low as possible. Equipotency means that there is no prior formal filtering for participation, but rather that it is the immediate practice of cooperation which determines the expertise and level of participation. Communication is not top-down and based on strictly defined reporting rules, but feedback is systemic, integrated in the protocol of the cooperative system. Techniques of 'participation capture' and other social accounting make automatic cooperation the default scheme of the project. Personal identity becomes partly generated by the contribution to the common project. As we will see, this is part and parcel of a widespread transformation to a mode of being which we call 'cooperative individualism'. P2P is not a return to earlier forms of community, but something new.

P2P is a network, not a pyramidal hierarchy (though it may have elements of it); it is 'distributed', though it may have elements of hierarchy, centralization and 'decentralization'; intelligence is not located at any center, but everywhere within the system. Assumed equipotency means that P2P systems start from the premise that ‘it doesn’t know where the needed resource will be located’, it assumes that ‘everybody’ can cooperate, and does not use formal rules in advance to determine its participating members. Acceptance in P2P projects is not based on formal credentials, since it is no longer believed that skills can be reflected in such formal documents, and they are therefore 'anti-credentialist'. Equipotency, i.e. the capacity to cooperate, is verified in the process of cooperation itself. Such an equipotency is widely differentiated, as complex projects need a vastly differentiated skillset. Thus, competition is limited, and replaced by complementarity. This is also why authority is widely distributed and subject to change. Validation of knowledge, acceptance of processes, are determined by the collective. Cooperation must be free, not forced, and not based on neutrality (i.e. the buying of cooperation in a monetary system). It exists to produce something. It enables the widest possible participation. These are a number of characteristics that we can use to describe P2P systems ‘in general’, and in particular as it emerges in the human lifeworld. Whereas participants in hierarchical systems are subject to the panoptism of the select few who control the vast majority, in P2P systems, participants have access to holoptism, the ability for any participant to see the whole. Further on we will examine more in depth characteristics such as de-formalization, de-institutionalization, de-commodification, which are also at the heart of P2P processes.

Whereas hierarchical systems are based on creating homogeneity amongst its 'dependent' members, distributed networks using the P2P dynamic regulate the 'interdependent' participants preserving heterogeneity. It is the 'object of cooperation' itself which creates the temporary unity. Culturally, P2P is about unity-in-diversity, or 'difference-in-unity': it is concrete 'post-Enlightenment' universalism predicated on common goals and projects; while hierarchy is predicated on creating sameness through identification and exclusion, and is associated with the abstract universalism of the Enlightenment.

To have a good understanding of P2P, I suggest the following mental exercise, think about these characteristics, then about their opposites. So doing, the radical innovative nature of P2P springs to mind. Though P2P is related to earlier social modes, those were most in evidence in the early tribal era, and it now emerges in an entirely new context, enabled by technologies that go beyond the barriers of time and space. After the dominance during the last several millennia, of centralized and hierarchical modes of social organization, it is thus in many ways now a radically innovative emergence, and also reflects a very deep change in the epistemological and ontological paradigms that determine behavior and worldviews.

An important clarification is that when we say that peer to peer systems have no hierarchy or are not centralized, we do not necessarily mean the complete absence of such characteristics. But in a P2P system, the use of hierarchy and centralization, serve the goal of participation and many-to-many cooperation, and are not used to prohibit or dominate it. This means that though P2P arises in distributed networks, not all distributed networks exhibit P2P processes. Many distributed bottom-up processes, such as the swarming behavior of insects, of the behavior of buyers and sellers in market, are not true P2P processes, to the degree that they lack holoptism, or do not promote participation. Insects in a swarm, do not have information about the whole, they follow markers that determine their individual behaviour. And a market is not equipotent since it excludes those without purchasing power. P2P, as a uniquely human phenomenon integrates moral and intentional aspects. When distributed meshworks, for example interlinking boards of directors, serve a hierarchy of wealth and power, and are based on exclusion rather than participation, this does not qualify as a full P2P process.

P2P can be a partial element of another process; or it can be a full process. For examples, the technological and collaborative infrastructure build around P2P principles, may enable non-P2P processes. In the example just above, it is the infrastructure of Empire, but it can also enable new types of marketplaces, gift/sharing economy practices. Where P2P is a full process, we will argue that it is a form of communal shareholding producing a new type of Commons.