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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.
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Why Two Heads Together are Worse Than Apart: A Context-Based Account of Collaborative Inhibition in Memory Search
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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- Award ID(s):
- 2316716
- PAR ID:
- 10616351
- Publisher / Repository:
- Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society
- Date Published:
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Proceeding:
- The DOI is not currently available.
