Memory for Conversation
Thursday, May 09, 2019 at 4:00pm to 5:00pm
Building 46, 3002
43 VASSAR ST, Cambridge, MA 02139
In conversation, the discourse history, including past referents and how they were described, shapes future language use. While it is widely known that interlocutors form representations of the discourse history, the veracity and similarity of these representations among interlocutors has not been widely explored. Through the study of referential form in conversation, combined with explicit measures of memory for past referents, I show that interlocutors are likely to walk away from a conversation with distinct memories for the contents, and in some cases the context of conversation. In general, speakers tend to remember what was said better than listeners do. Studies of conversational language use in persons with anterograde amnesia offer insights into the biological memory systems involved. The findings have implications for how common ground is formed in conversation, and suggest that there are limits on the degree to which interlocutors can achieve coordinated representations of the discourse history. More generally, this work demonstrates that the successful exchange of meaning in conversation involves imperfect, asymmetric representations of the jointly experienced past.
Dr. Brown-Schmidt is an Associate Professor of Psychology & Human Development at Vanderbilt University. Brown-Schmidt’s area of research is language processing and memory, with a focus on conversation. Her work examines language processing across the lifespan, and in healthy persons and in persons with memory impairment. Brown-Schmidt earned a BA from Reed College in 1999, and a PhD from the University of Rochester in 2005. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the Beckman Institute, Brown-Schmidt was Assistant, then Associate Professor at the University of Illinois from 2010-2016, and now at Vanderbilt University. Her work is funded by the NSF and the NIH.
The MIT Colloquium on the Brain and Cognition is a lecture series held weekly during the academic year and features a wide array of speakers from all areas of neuroscience and cognitive science research. The social receptions that follow these colloquia bring together students, staff, and faculty to discuss the talk, as well as other research activities within Building 46, at MIT, and around the world. This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT. Colloquia are open to the community, and are held in MIT's Building 46, Room 3002 (Singleton Auditorium) at 4:00PM with a reception to follow in the Building 46 Atrium.
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