Organizational Memory

I wanted to briefly mention the newest research coming out of my Communication & Cognition lab at Ohio State. I am working on a collaborative project with fellow assistant professor, Ed Palazzolo. The new project brings together Ed's expertise on transactive memory and my knowledge of human memory.

In short, and I am surely not doing it justice, transactive memory describes organizational knowledge of who knows what. So when I need to buy something for my lab, I may not know how to get an OSU purchase order, but I know who knows. Furthermore, when I read something about audio research, I forward it to my friend and colleague Rob Potter because he is an expert in this area. Another way of thinking of this is that I am helping to increase Rob's expertise because when I learn something about audio, I make sure he knows, too.

There are great existing models of transactive memory, but they use lookup tables. And my cognitive science training tells me that you probably don't have a lookup table in your noggin. But you do have a neural network. So Ed and I are working to extend the transactive memory model using a neural network. Right now this involves Ed doing a lot of patient explaining and me doing a lot of Java coding. But the model is shaping up pretty nicely, and we are both learning something new about our field.