Emergence of collective memory

This applet visualizes how collective memory group is formed through dissemination of information.
In order to run the applet you need Java Runtime Environment installed.

Each node indicates an individual. Each link shows how two individuals have a similar memory.
The line thickness is proportional to Jaccard similarity J_ij .
N individuals are placed on complete social graph (max N=50).

At each time step t,
1) communication events between individuals are occurred with rate r
2) misunderstanding events are also occurred with rate f
3) familiarities between agents are decayed as a amount of phi
4) weights of arcs in memory web of each individual are decayed as a amount of mu.

Click “Initialization” button to restart dynamics with new variables.
Control the simulation speed with the slider.
If the slider is moved to the most left side, the simulation will be stopped.

Network narrative. Causality is intimately linked with understanding. Understanding an event is semantically almost equal to identifying its causes. Even if the physical paths of causality between these events are continuous, with a close to infinite number of microscopic events linking them, we organize the events into discrete macro events, more distant in time. Causality is defined as the relationship between two events called cause and effect, respectively. Interestingly, the perception of events is the same, however, the causality can be differently interpreted, since a causal link is a mental pairing, ordered in time, between two events. History has studied with a narrative to examine and analyze the sequence of events, and has often attempted to investigate objectively the patterns of cause and effect that determine events. Understanding an episode of history is to identify a chain, or web, of such causal relationships. Our mental picture of history, at all levels, takes the form of such directed causal networks. We can acquire our mental, causal networks through several processes - experiencing them as they happen, hearing about them in media, hearing about them from other people, and also cognitively drawing our own causal links to create a consistent picture of history. Thus, we can map our memory to network narrative.

Reference. Sungmin Lee, Verónica C. Ramenzoni and Petter Holme, PLoS ONE 5, e12522 (2010).
Contact. Sungmin Lee jrpeter@tp.umu.se, Petter Holme petter.holme@physics.umu.se.