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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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Retrieval processes and audience design
Conversational partners develop shared knowledge. In referential communication tasks, partners collaboratively establish brief labels for hard-to-name images. These image-label mappings are associated in memory with that partner, evidenced by use of those brief labels with the same partner, and longer descriptions with new partners. According to the people-as-contexts view, the conversational partner functions as a contextual cue to support retrieval of conversationally-relevant information. Inspired by findings from the memory literature that context effects can be stronger when retrieval is more explicit, two experiments test the hypothesis that the speaker will be more likely to invoke the partner as a retrieval cue when retrieval processes are more explicit. The results indicated a strong effect of partner that, contrary to these predictions, was not boosted by explicit retrieval processes. The lack of an effect of retrieval processes speaks to the ubiquity with which language use in conversation is tailored to the particular people with whom we converse.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1921492
- PAR ID:
- 10274085
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of memory and language
- Volume:
- 115
- ISSN:
- 0749-596X
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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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.more » « less
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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.more » « less
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Labels may play a role in the formation and acquisition of ob- ject categories. We investigated this using a free-categorization task, manipulating the presence or absence of labels and whether labels were random or reinforced one of two alterna- tive categorization cues (taxonomic or thematic relationships). When labels were absent, participants used thematic and taxo- nomic cues equally to categorize stimuli. When present, labels were used as the primary cue for category formation, with ran- dom labels leading participants to attend less to taxonomic and thematic relations between stimuli. When labels redundantly reinforced either thematic or taxonomic cues, the use of the cue in question was boosted along with the use of labels as a cue for categorization. Most interestingly, in spite of pre- viously observed associations between labels and taxonomic grouping, labels did not preferentially boost the use of either taxonomic or thematic cues in comparison with the other.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2020.104149
