Collaborative Facilitation and Collaborative Inhibition in Virtual Environments

Andrea Guazzini,Eiko Yoneki,Elisa Guidi,Cristina Cecchini

doi:10.3390/fi12070118

Andrea Guazzini, Eiko Yoneki + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/fi12070118

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Journal: Future internet	Publication Date: Jul 13, 2020
Citations: 6	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: University of Florence, University of Cambridge

Abstract

Worldwide, organizations and small and medium-sized enterprises have already disruptively changed in many ways their physiological inner mechanisms, because of information and communication technologies (ICT) revolution. Nevertheless, the still ongoing COVID-19 worldwide emergency definitely promoted a wide adoption of teleworking modalities for many people around the world, making it more relevant than before to understand the real impact of virtual environments (VEs) on teamwork dynamics. From a psychological point of view, a critical question about teleworking modalities is how the social and cognitive dynamics of collaborative facilitation and collaborative inhibition would affect teamwork within VEs. This study analyzed the impact of a virtual environment (VE) on the recall of individuals and members of nominal and collaborative groups. The research assessed costs and benefits for collaborative retrieval by testing the effect of experimental conditions, stimulus materials, group size, experimental conditions order, anxiety state, personality traits, gender group composition and social interactions. A total of 144 participants were engaged in a virtual Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) classical paradigm, which involved remembering word lists across two successive sessions, in one of four protocols: I-individual/nominal, I I -nominal/individual, I I I -nominal/collaborative, I V -collaborative/nominal. Results suggested, in general, a reduced collaborative inhibition effect in the collaborative condition than the nominal and individual condition. A combined effect between experimental condition and difficulty of the task appears to explain the presence of collaborative inhibition or facilitation. Nominal groups appeared to enhance the collaborative groups’ performance when virtual nominal groups come before collaborative groups. Variables such as personality traits, gender and social interactions may have a contribution to collaborative retrieval. In conclusion, this study indicated how VEs could maintain those peculiar social dynamics characterizing the participants’ engagement in a task, both working together and individually, and could affect their intrinsic motivation as well as performances. These results could be exploited in order to design brand new and evidenced-based practices, to improve teleworking procedures and workers well-being, as well as teleworking teamwork effectiveness.

Highlights

Many activities or tasks that take place in both organizational and social contexts require collaboratively recalling information [1]
In their review, the authors highlighted that increased memory coordination costs and retrieval disruption strategy are the main factors related to collaborative inhibition while building common ground among group members, activities/tasks gaining multiple perspectives and shared information related to the activities/tasks are key mechanisms associated with collaborative facilitation [9]
Through a systematic review [10], other researchers tested variables predicted by the retrieval disruption strategy in collaborative inhibition which was greater for larger groups, turn-taking retrieval and groups of strangers while it was weaker for forced-order tests and story-like materials [10]

Summary

Introduction

Many activities or tasks that take place in both organizational and social contexts require collaboratively recalling information [1]. The collaborative recall paradigms were typically developed to evaluate the costs (i.e., collaborative inhibition) and benefits (i.e., collaborative facilitation) of remembering in a group context (e.g., the percentage of studied stimulus accurately recalled) [6]. Within this approach, the majority of the studies have assessed the impact of recalling with someone else, comparing the results of collaborative groups to the outcomes of nominal groups (i.e., the sum of the outputs of non-interacting individuals) or individuals alone [7,8]. On one hand, a benefit on subsequent individual retrieval from prior collaborative retrieval and, on the other hand, a possible contribution of retrieval inhibition on collaborative inhibition [10]

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