Performance similarities predict collective benefits in dyadic and triadic joint visual search.

Basil Wahn,Peter König,Artur Czeszumski

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0191179

Basil Wahn, Peter König + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0191179

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Abstract

When humans perform tasks together, they may reach a higher performance in comparison to the best member of a group (i.e., a collective benefit). Earlier research showed that interindividual performance similarities predict collective benefits for several joint tasks. Yet, researchers did not test whether this is the case for joint visuospatial tasks. Also, researchers did not investigate whether dyads and triads reach a collective benefit when they are forbidden to exchange any information while performing a visuospatial task. In this study, participants performed a joint visual search task either alone, in dyads, or in triads, and were not allowed to exchange any information while doing the task. We found that dyads reached a collective benefit. Triads did outperform their best individual member and dyads—yet, they did not outperform the best dyad pairing within the triad. In addition, similarities in performance significantly predicted the collective benefit for dyads and triads. Furthermore, we find that the dyads’ and triads’ search performances closely match a simulated performance based on the individual search performances, which assumed that members of a group act independently. Overall, the present study supports the view that performance similarities predict collective benefits in joint tasks. Moreover, it provides a basis for future studies to investigate the benefits of exchanging information between co-actors in joint visual search tasks.

Highlights

In daily life, humans often perform tasks together to achieve a shared goal [1,2,3]
While the performance benefit for dyads does replicate earlier findings by Brennan and colleagues [4], the performance benefit for triads is a novel finding, which suggests that increasing the group size does lead to additional benefits
We investigated whether dyads searched faster than the best group member’s individual search performance

Summary

Introduction

Humans often perform tasks together to achieve a shared goal [1,2,3]. Examples are humans carrying a table together [1], searching for a friend in a crowd [4], or playing team sports such as soccer or basketball. Depending on how groups perform these tasks, they may reach a higher performance compared to the best group member’s individual performance (i.e., a “collective benefit” [5, 6]). Collective benefits have been investigated in a wide variety of tasks such as joint visuomotor tasks [7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14], joint visuospatial tasks [4, 15,16,17,18,19], joint memory [20, 21], or joint perceptual.

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