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WHAT WE STUDY
The Cognition of Individual and Collective Memory
People often create and recall memories in social settings. Yet, the past 100 years of cognitive research has mainly focused on memory at the individual level. Our aim is to understand how social influences shape memory and learning. The Social Memory and Cognition Lab focuses on addressing empirical and theoretical questions about the nature and influences of social memory. This research addresses several questions about (1) how memory propagates among social connections and the consequences of such memory contagion, (2) the indirect influence on our memories of people in our social networks whom we have never met, (3) sharing of emotional memories in social groups, (4) changes in our memory representations as a result of reminiscing with others, (5) social memory and aging, (6) effects of social and non-social scaffolding on learning and using general knowledge, and (7) the emergence of collective memory. We gratefully acknowledge support for our research by the National Institute of Mental Health, National Science Foundation, Russell Sage Foundation, a Google Faculty Research Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and Stony Brook Research Funds.
RECENT HIGHLIGHTS
November 20, 2025
A Conversation with Dean David Wrobel, College of Arts and Sciences – October 2025
The Difference You Make: The Ideas That Matter (October, 2025)
A Conversation about Mentorship with the SBU Graduate School – October 2025
William James Research Center at the University of Aveiro, Portugal – July 7-9, 2025
Suparna Rajaram delivered a lecture, led a workshop, and participated in a panel discussion.
Presidential Plenary Session at APS – May 24, 2025
Suparna Rajaram presented her group’s research in an invited talk titled, How Cognition Shapes Collective Memory in the Psychological Science and Society Plenary Session on Collective Cognition at the Association for Psychological Science (APS).
The Observer (June 2025) covers APS plenary highlights at the 2025 Convention, Washington, D.C.
Guest APS Presidential Column – February 27, 2025
The Outer Workings of Interacting Minds, by Nancy J. Cooke, Robert L. Goldstone, & Suparna Rajaram
OTHER HIGHLIGHTS
It is an honor to have our work featured as an example of discovery and innovation in research by the Editor-in-Chief Dr. Bennett Schwartz in his inaugural Editorial for the Psychonomic Society‘s journal, Memory & Cognition
“…Building on previous work on the topic (e.g., Weldon & Bellinger, 1997), Rajaram and Pereira-Pasarin’s paper was an act of discovery – explicitly opening new ideas – in this case, crossing social psychology theory with well-known memory phenomena. Rajaram and Pereira-Pasarin (2010) argued that, as memory researchers, we need to consider how individual acts of learning and memory fit into a social framework in family, school, or work settings. Since then, Rajaram’s focus on both facilitatory and inhibitory effects of social influences on memory have been tested under many different conditions, notably with the free-recall methodology, and across an array of different instructions, all of which generally replicate the basic findings (Greeley & Rajaram, 2023).” https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13421-024-01594-
