Chapter 2: Emergence in Conversational Remembering

It is has been widely demonstrated that memories are formed, shaped, and recollected in social interaction (Middleton & Brown, 2005; Wagoner & Gillespie, 2014). However, the dominant assumption in cognitive psychology, which goes back to Ebbinghaus (1885/1913), is that other people are little more than stimuli, cueing something already internal, with the substantial work of memory being an individual cognitive feat. This cognitive approach, we will argue, vastly underestimates the relational qualities of remembering and ignores the wider cultural background against which memories are reconstructed. Sociocultural psychology, in contrast, conceptualizes social others and cultural artifacts as directly participating in and being constitutive of remembering (Cole, 1996). It moves away from the notion of separate internal and external storage of memory to consider the properties that emerge in the interaction between the two. The core concept is that of semiotic mediation, whereby the person dynamically regulates their own conduct with the use of signs (Valsiner, 2007; Vygotsky & Luria, 1994). Memory becomes a social and cultural process (instead of a cognitive faculty or thing) that takes place with the use of cultural and semi-otic tools in a context that is both physical and social (Brescó & Wagoner, 2015; Wertsch, this volume).