Pronounshe, him, his, his, himself

Department/College/UnitSocial Sciences Division

TitleAssociate Professor

AffiliationFaculty

Web SiteYamashiro

Primary Office LocationSocial Sciences 2
365

Office Hours(Fall 2024) Tuesdays, 2pm - 3pm, by appointment Soc Sci 2 rm 365

Mail StopPsychology Faculty Services

Biography, Education and Training

Jeremy K. Yamashiro is an Associate Professor of Psychology at UCSC. He received his PhD at the New School for Social Research in New York with Bill Hirst. He did postdoctoral training at Washington University in St. Louis with Henry L. Roediger, III and James V. Wertsch, as well as at Princeton University as an affiliate at the Kahneman-Treisman Center for Behavioral Science & Public Policy and the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs with Alin Coman.

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.

Teaching Interests

Memory Proseminar

Learning & Memory

General Psychology

Awards, Honors and Grants

James S. McDonnell Foundation, "Collective Temporal Thought"

FACE Foundation Transatlantic Research Partnership, "Social representations of national decline in France and the USA: Social and cognitive components"

Institute for Social Transformation, Catalyze Seed Grant

Institute for Social Transformation, Catalyze Sprout Grant

Selected Publications

Yamashiro, J. and Yao, Z. (In production, to appear in 2026). Collective Memory. In A. Sant’Anna & C.F. Craver (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Memory. Oxford University Press. In Production.

Yamashiro, J. and Topçu, M. (2025). Collective Future Thinking. In A. Erll & W. Hirst (Eds.), Cognition, Culture, and Political Momentum: A Companion to Interdisciplinary Memory Research. Oxford University Press. In Press.

Sözer, E., *Yamashiro, J., and Hirst, W. (2024). Simulating conversations: A Markov chain model of a central speaker’s mnemonic influence over a group of communicating listeners. Memory & Cognition, 52, 430-443, doi: 10.3758/s13421-023-01472-w

Putnam, A., Yamashiro, J., Tekin, E., and Roediger, H.L., III. (2023). Collective overclaiming is related to collective narcissism and numeracy. Memory & Cognition, 52(4), 840-851, doi: 10.3758/s13421-023-01504-5

Yamashiro, J. and Pérez-Amparán, E. (2023). Memory media design shapes perceived temporal distance of depicted historical events: Color vs. Black and White photographs. Journal for Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 13(4), 526-532, https://doi.org/10.1037/mac0000144

Hamilton, K., *Yamashiro, J., Storm, B. (2023). Rethinking cognition for a digital environment. Applied Cognitive Psychology, in press.

Storm, B., Bittner, D.L., and Yamashiro, J. (2023). The changing dynamics and consequences of memory retrieval in the age of the Internet. In Q. Wang and A. Hoskins (Eds.), The Remaking of Memory in the Age of Social Media and the Internet. Oxford University Press.

Yamashiro, J. and Pashkov, E. (2023). Varieties of frames structuring collective temporal thought. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 12(1), 29-33. https://doi.org/10.1037/mac0000102

Yamashiro, J., Liu, J., and Zhang, J. (2022). Implicit intertemporal trajectories in cognitive representations of the self and nation. Memory & Cognition, 51, 1027-1040. https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13421-022-01366-3

Yamashiro, J. (2022). Psychological aspects of national memory: An American case study. In J. Wertsch & H.L. Roediger, III (Eds.), Constructing National Identity: Conflicting Memories and Narratives. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Roediger, H.L., III, Putnam, A., and Yamashiro, J. (2022). National and state narcissism as reflected in overclaiming. In J. Wertsch & H.L. Roediger, III (Eds.), Constructing National Identity: Conflicting Memories and Narratives. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Yamashiro, J. (2021). Review of the book, How Nations Remember, by J.V. Wertsch, Oxford University Press. Memory Studies, 15(1), 243-254.

Yamashiro, J. and Roediger, H.L., III. (2021). Biased collective memories and historical overclaiming: An availability heuristic account. Memory & Cognition, 49(2), 311-322. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-020-01090-w.

Merck, C., Yamashiro, J., and Hirst, W. (2020). Remembering the big game: Social identity and memory for media events. Memory, 28(6), 795-814. DOI: 10.1080/09658211.2020.1784232

Roediger, H.L., III and Yamashiro, J. (2020). Evaluating experimental research. In R.J. Sternberg & D.F. Halpern (Eds.), Critical Thinking in Psychology, 2nd Edition (pp. 249-279). Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.

Yamashiro, J. and Hirst, W. (2020). 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.