BIM Building an interdisciplinary science of memory

Memory is a complex entity which interests a large range of disciplines. This complexity has so far been considered from different disciplinary perspectives, leading sometimes to contradictory conclusions as regard to where memory is located and how it works. While social sciences stress on the relational and interactionist dimension of memory, biology and neurosciences insist on its material and on the way it is stored and engraved. Taking stock of this gap, this project brings together researchers from social sciences, psychology and neurosciences to build a bridge between these approaches, hoping to move beyond this gap to study together, and as an interdisciplinary team, social influences of memory. The originality of our project is the co-construction of research experiments by researchers from social sciences, psychology and neurosciences as a way to introduce social dimension to the understanding of biology but also, in return, to open new perspectives for the understanding of social dynamics of human memory. To do so we will build an experimental project on the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, co-built by social and neuro scientists. While social behavior in biology will often be reduced only to the interactions between conspecifics, social sciences defend the deeply social nature of the environment an individual evolves in. Through the starting work of PhD student Mathieu Kunetz, we aim to study how life experiences, the effects of the abiotic environment but also the direct and indirect effects of other individuals, can shape how a fly will remember traumatic events later in life.