Swarm Intelligence

of memories between them, so that some details are known by one or

the other, but not both (honey, isn’t Georgey’s birthday around this time

of year?).

A second social aspect of memory is its content—a great proportion of

an individual’s memories refer to past social actions and experiences.

Finally, research on recall in face-to-face groups has shown that the pro-

cess of memory is often based on symbolic communications with other

people. Collaborative recall appears to be affected by three kinds of vari-

ables: the group’s consensus favoring an alternative, the correctness of

the alternative, and members’ apparent confidence in their recall.

Levine, ...