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1. Why Two Heads Together are Worse Than Apart: A Context-Based Account of Collaborative Inhibition in Memory Search

   Angne, H; Cornell, C A; Zhang, Q (July 2024, Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society)

   Contrary to common intuition, groups of people recalling information together remember less than the same number of individuals recalling alone (i.e., the collaborative inhibition effect). To understand this effect in a free recall task, we build a computational model of collaborative recall in groups, extended from the Context Maintenance and Retrieval (CMR) model which captures how individuals recall information alone (Polyn, Norman, & Kahana, 2009). We propose that in collaborative recall, one not only uses their previous recall as an internal retrieval cue, but also listens to someone else’s recall and uses it as an external retrieval cue. Attending to this cue updates the listener’s context to be more similar to the context of someone else’s recall. Over an existing dataset of individual and collaborative recall in small and large groups (Gates, Suchow, & Griffiths, 2022), we show that our model successfully captures the difference in memory performance between individual recall and collaborative recall across different group sizes from 2 to 16, as well as additional recall patterns such as recency effects and semantic clustering effects. Our model further shows that the contexts of collaborating individuals converge more than the contexts of individuals who recall alone. We discuss the contributions of our modeling results in relation to previous accounts of the collaborative inhibition effect. 

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2. A context-based model of collaborative inhibition during memory search

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-78517-w  

   Angne, Hemali; Cornell, Charlotte A; Zhang, Qiong (December 2024, Scientific Reports)

   Abstract Contrary to common intuition, a group of people recalling information together remembers less than the same number of individuals recalling alone (i.e., the collaborative inhibition effect). To understand this effect in a free recall task, we build a computational model of collaborative recall in groups, extended from the Context Maintenance and Retrieval (CMR) model, which captures how individuals recall information alone. We propose that in collaborative recall, one not only uses their previous recall as an internal retrieval cue, but one also listens to someone else’s recall and uses it as an external retrieval cue. Attending to this cue updates the listener’s context to be more similar to the context of someone else’s recall. Over an existing dataset of individual and collaborative recall in small and large groups, we show that our model successfully captures the difference in memory performance between individual recall and collaborative recall across different group sizes from 2 to 16, as well as additional recall patterns such as recency effects and semantic clustering effects. Our model further shows that collaborating individuals reach similar areas in the context space, whereby their contexts converge more than the contexts of individuals recalling alone. This convergence constrains their ability to search memories effectively and is negatively associated with recall performance. We discuss the contributions of our modeling results in relation to previous accounts of the collaborative inhibition effect. 

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3. Conversing with a devil’s advocate: Interpersonal coordination in deception and disagreement

   https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0178140  

   Duran, N.; Fusaroli, R. (June 2017, PloS one)

   This study investigates the presence of dynamical patterns of interpersonal coordination in extended deceptive conversations across multimodal channels of behavior. Using a novel "devil’s advocate" paradigm, we experimentally elicited deception and truth across topics in which conversational partners either agreed or disagreed, and where one partner was surreptitiously asked to argue an opinion opposite of what he or she really believed. We focus on interpersonal coordination as an emergent behavioral signal that captures interdependencies between conversational partners, both as the coupling of head movements over the span of milliseconds, measured via a windowed lagged cross correlation (WLCC) technique, and more global temporal dependencies across speech rate, using cross recurrence quantification analysis (CRQA). Moreover, we considered how interpersonal coordination might be shaped by strategic, adaptive conversational goals associated with deception. We found that deceptive conversations displayed more structured speech rate and higher head movement coordination, the latter with a peak in deceptive disagreement conversations. Together the results allow us to posit an adaptive account, whereby interpersonal coordination is not beholden to any single functional explanation, but can strategically adapt to diverse conversational demands. 

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4. Exploring the abstractness of number retrieval cues in the computation of subject-verb agreement in comprehension

   Schlueter, Zoe.; Williams, Alexander; Lau, Ellen (April 2018, Journal of memory and language)

   Subject-verb agreement has provided critical insights into the cue-based memory retrieval system that supports language comprehension by showing that memory interference can cause erroneous agreement with non-subjects: ‘agreement attraction’. Here we ask how faithful retrieval cues are in relation to the grammar. We examine the impact of conjoined singular attractors (The advice from the doctor and the nurse. . .), which are syntactically plural but whose plurality is introduced by a vehicle, the conjunction ‘and’, that is not an unequivocal correlate of syntactic plurality. We find strong agreement attraction, which suggests that retrieval processes do not only target unequivocal morphological correlates of syn- tactic plurality. However, we also find some attraction with conjoined adjective attractors (The advice from the diligent and compassionate doctor. . .), which is compatible with a system in which an imperfect correlate of syntactic plurality, like the word ‘and’, can become associated with the plural retrieval cue due to frequent co-occurrence with the actual target feature. 

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5. Out of sight but in mind: Experimentally activating partner representations in daily life buffers against common stressors.

   https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0001419  

   Zayas, Vivian; Urganci, Betul; Strycharz, Steve (March 2025, Emotion)

   Lab experiments have shown that reminders of romantic partners buffer against stressors. Yet, tightly controlled experiments do not mimic what transpires in people’s actual lives. Thus, an important question is as follows: To what extent do reminders of romantic partners confer affective bene ts when they occur“in the wild” as people experience their daily activities? To capture people’s emotional experience in real time, two studies, each spanning 3 months, used event-contingent ecological momentary assessments with a within-subject experimental manipulation. Prior to encountering a stressful event (taking an exam), participants received either a supportive text message from their partner or no message (Studies 1 and 2), or a supportive text message from the research team (Study 2). Receiving supportive partner messages, compared to no messages or messages from the research team, led to less negative affect and greater positive affect, and to less negative affect and greater positive affect about the exam itself. Receiving supportive partner messages had no statistically signi cant effects on subjective stress. Interestingly, the quality of the partner messages, as coded by independent raters, did not signi cantly predict the magnitude of the affective bene ts. These ndings suggest that receiving any supportive partner message, and not necessarily more subtle differences in the quality of the message, may be the key ingredient for these bene ts to occur. The present work advances understanding of how the symbolic presence of partners confers affective regulatory bene ts in everyday life. Implications for emotion regulation and the utility of integrating perspectives from adult attachment are discussed. 

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