The Cognitive Mechanism of Collaborative Inhibition

Abstract

The Collaborative Inhibition refers to that when individuals work together to retrieve information as a group, the collaborative group would recall less than the polled, non-redundant information recalled by the same number of individuals working alone (a nominal group). Researchers try to explain the collaborative inhibition effect in cognitive views such as retrieval strategy disruption hypotheses and retrieval inhibition hypotheses. The article makes a special focus on those two hypotheses in the introduction part. We also convey an analysis of recent studies which support those hypotheses respectively in details. And this review pays attention to the researches which the two hypotheses cannot explain as well. Future studies should focus on: ①Whether the retrieval strategy disruption or the retrieval inhibition contributes to the collaborative inhibition? ②Do the speaker's recall cause the listener's selective forgetting in a collaborative group? ③If we alter the conditions in the encoding phase, does the collaborative inhibition will remain stationary? Does the extent of the collaborative inhibition change? Future studies should also demonstrate the above two hypotheses and explain the cognitive mechanism of collaborative inhibition appropriately.