Chapter 4: Setting Specificity and Memory: A Perspective From Sociocultural Psychology

Steve Brown and Paula Reavey make an excellent case, in their chapter “Memory in the Wild,” for the importance of adopting an ecological perspective on memory. To adopt such an approach, they propose to use three concepts: life space, setting specificity, and experience-ecologies. In this commentary, I would like to build on their discussion of memory as setting specific, that is, as dependent on the setting within which the person remembers, and discuss it from a sociocultural perspective. While I agree with Brown and Reavey’s emphasis on the importance of context, I would argue that their claim—grounded in ecological but, more fundamentally, in discursive psychology—that it is the setting that “does the remembering” is perhaps taking this feature a step too far. Instead, I will discuss three aspects of remembering that limit the influence of the direct context: memory traces, trajectories of remembering, and intentionality. I will thus argue that while setting specificity is an important dimension of memory, remembering should not be reduced to it, and doing so runs the risks of making the psychological subject disappear.