Psychology Faculty

Summary of Expertise

Social aspects of memory, collective memory, social representations, extended cognition

Research Interests

Jeremy Yamashiro studies social remembering from two angles, a bottom-up and a top-down angle, which we might loosely gloss as remembering in social interaction and remembering as a member of a social group, respectively.

In the bottom up approach, he examines how basic cognitive phenomena - such as those recruited during selective memory retrieval - play out in social communication. Particularly interesting are the sociocognitive mechanisms by which people in conversation can converge onto a shared memory, and the emergent consequences of this mnemonic convergence at the level of communicating dyads and larger social network structures.

In the top-down approach, he examines psychological characteristics of collective memory - memories shared by members of a group that pertain to their group membership. This line of work treats collective memories as analogues to autobiographical memory, in that they support a representation of the social group as an entity that exists across time in the same way that autobiographical memory supports the image of a self-same individual.

Biography, Education and Training

Jeremy Yamashiro is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at UCSC. He received his PhD at the New School for Social Research in New York. He did postdoctoral training at Washington University in St. Louis, as well as Princeton University as an affiliate at the Kahneman-Treisman Center for Behavioral Science & Public Policy and the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs.

Selected Publications

Yamashiro, J. and Hirst, W. (2019). Convergence on collective memories: Central speakers and distributed remembering. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Advance online publication. DOI: 10.1037/xge0000656

Yamashiro, J. and Roediger, H.L., III. (2019). How we have fallen: Implicit trajectories in collective temporal thought. Memory, 27(8), 1158-1166. DOI:10.1080/09658211.2019.1635161

Churchill, L., Yamashiro, J., and Roediger, H.L. III. (2019). Moralized memory: Binding values predict inflated estimates of the group’s historical influence. Memory, 27(8), 1099-1109. DOI: 10.1080/09658211.2019.1623261

Yamashiro, J., Van Engen, A., and Roediger, H.L., III (2019). American Origins: Political and religious divides in U.S. collective memory. Memory Studies, 15(1), Advance online publication. DOI:10.177/150698019856065

Roediger, H.L. III and Yamashiro, J. (2019). Memory. In R.J. Sternberg & W. Pickren (Eds.), Handbook of the Intellectual History of Psychology: How Psychological Ideas Have Evolved from Past to Present (pp. 165-215). Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. 

Yamashiro, J. and Roediger, H.L. III. (2019). Expanding cognition: A brief consideration of technological advances over the past 4000 years. [Peer commentary on “Digital expansion of the mind: Implications of Internet usage for memory and cognition,” by Elizabeth Marsh and Suparna Rajaram]. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 8(1), 15-19.

Hirst, W., Yamashiro, J., and Coman, A. (2018). Collective memory from a psychological perspective. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 22(5), 438-451. 

Hirst, W. and Yamashiro, J. (2017). Social aspects of forgetting. In M.L. Meade, A. Barnier, P. Van Bergen, C. Harris, & J. Sutton (Eds.). Collective Remembering: How Remembering with Others Influences Memory (pp. 76-99). NY: Cambridge University Press. 

Yamashiro, J. and Hirst, W. (2014). Mnemonic convergence in a social network: Collective memory and extended influence. Journal for Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 3(4), 272-279. 

Fagin, M., Yamashiro, J., and Hirst, W. (2013). The adaptive function of distributed remembering: Contributions to the formation of collective memory. Review of Philosophy and Psychology 4(1), 91-106. 

Teaching Interests

Memory Proseminar

Learning & Memory

General Psychology