Familiarity Modulates the Dynamics of Collaborative Inhibition in a Trivia Game

Familiarity Modulates the Dynamics of Collaborative Inhibition in a Trivia Game Janelle Szary (jszary@ucmerced.edu) Rick Dale (rdale@ucmerced.edu) Cognitive and Information Sciences, University of California, Merced, 5200 Lake Rd Merced, CA 95343 USA Abstract A number of open questions are still unanswered about whether and how dyads perform better compared to individ- uals on memory tasks. The literature on collaborative recall demonstrates a robust collaborative inhibition effect, where participants do worse when remembering in collaborative con- texts. However, a growing body of research suggests that this inhibition can be ameliorated, or even reversed, under certain task and social conditions. Here we construct nominal groups (hypothetically optimal aggregates of individual performers) to compare to collaborative groups. We observe collaborative inhibition on two performance metrics (number of trivia clues answered, speed of answering), but we find a facilitatory effect of collaboration on two other performance metrics (accuracy, number of clues subsequently recalled). We also show that fa- miliarity can reduce this collaborative inhibition in many ways. Keywords: Collaborative Cognition; Collaborative Mem- ory; Collaborative Recall; Coordinative Structures; Transac- tive Memory Systems; Joint Action Introduction In knowledge-based, joint-action tasks such as working on crossword puzzles or playing team trivia games, success de- pends not only on the knowledge of each individual, but the way that this knowledge is transferred, synthesized, and generated at the interactive, group level. The current paper uses a trivia task to allow us to connect the well-established work on collaborative memory (and specifically, the collab- orative recall paradigm) with the emerging joint-action liter- ature. The collaborative recall paradigm is one of the most frequently used methods of studying collaborative memory. In this paradigm, participants are asked to reproduce a known or learned list of items, either individually or in collabora- tive groups. Although the overall group product is often higher than the product of controlled individual participants, it almost always fails to outperform the nominal group prod- uct, consisting of the pooled, non-overlapping (i.e., a hypo- thetic, optimal combination of) items recalled by individuals (Barnier, Sutton, Harris, & Wilson, 2008). That is, at the in- dividual level, people remember better when working alone, and don’t perform at their full potential during collaboration. This robust finding is known as collaborative inhibition, and is thought to result from participants’ disruption of each oth- ers’ unique retrieval strategies during recall (Basden, Basden, Bryner, & III, 1997). Collaborative inhibition has been ob- served in a number of studies, many of which give specific support to the retrieval disruption hypothesis (for a review, see Rajaram & Pereira-Pasarin, 2010). An innovative study by Meade, Nokes, and Morrow (2009) challenged the ubiquity of collaborative inhibition. Memory for previously studied flight scenarios was tested for groups composed of expert pilots, novice pilots, or non-pilots. While novices and non-pilots exhibited the standard collaborative inhibition effect, expert pilots did not. In fact, the experts exhibited collaborative facilitation–they were better at re- membering together than remembering alone. Meade and colleagues (2009) note that these results are consistent with the retrieval disruption hypothesis, in that experts have simi- lar training and knowledge that allows them, presumably, to encode and retrieve information similarly (or, at least, non- disruptively). Harris and colleagues (2010), however, note that these results provide empirical justification for the trans- active memory (TM) systems approach (cf. Wegner, 1987). In TM systems, groups of individuals share the burden of remembering. Although some information is stored only within the individuals, through communication a successful group can share and combine information, resulting in group- level knowledge that exceeds that of any of its individual members. In some cases, the pieces of information held by individual group members can be combined into knowledge that none of the members individually possessed, and in this sense, the whole can truly come to be more than the sum of its parts. According to Wegner, Erber, and Raymond (1991), these emergent memory systems are more likely to succeed when group members are familiar with each other (as exper- tise and role within the group are already known and can be exploited). Harris et al. (2010; and see Harris, Keil, Sutton, Barnier, & McIlwain, 2011) found evidence for this kind of TM system in their study of couples who had been married for over 20 years. Many of these couples were able to demon- strate collaborative facilitation, but the pattern of results was complex: facilitation was not stable across couples, tasks, nor across within-task topics. Similarly, Hollingshead (1998) found that couples were more likely to form TM systems, but only under certain communication and task conditions. A successful TM system can be conceptualized as a spe- cial case of the more general coordinative structure frame- work described by Shockley, Richardson, and Dale (2009). A coordinative structure is a self-organized, softly assembled (i.e. temporary), set of components that emerges naturally, under certain conditions, and behaves as a single unit (see also Bernstein, 1967). The domain of joint-action is ripe with examples of how people coordinate to move together, either in service of a shared goal (Richardson, Marsh, & Baron, 2007), or even unintentionally (Richardson, Marsh, Isen- hower, Goodman, & Schmidt, 2007; and see Marsh, Richard- son, & Schmidt, 2009). Tollefsen and Dale (2012) point out that when individuals are engaged in a joint task or joint ac- tion, they become aligned at multiple levels, including body