Abstract
Collaborative inhibition refers to when people working together remember less than their predicted potential. The most common explanation for this effect is the retrieval-disruption hypothesis during collaborative recall. However, several recent studies have obtained conflicting results concerning this hypothesis. In the current study, item similarity was manipulated in Experiment 1 by requiring participants to study overlapping or non-overlapping unrelated wordlists. The unstructured instructions were then manipulated during a turn-taking recall task between conditions. The results showed that collaborative inhibition occurred for both overlapping and non-overlapping conditions. Subsequently, response competition during collaborative recall, in addition to item similarity, was manipulated in Experiment 2, and the results showed that when collaborative group members were instructed to recall in turn and monitor their partner’s recall (the medium- and high-response-competition conditions), collaborative inhibition occurred. However, no such effect was shown when collaborative group members were instructed not to communicate with each other, but to simply recall in turn while in a group (low-response-competition condition). Together, these results suggest that the conflicts between the findings of the aforementioned studies were probably caused by differing instructions, which induced response competition in collaborative settings. Aside from retrieval-disruption, other possible mechanisms underlying collaborative inhibition were also discussed.
Highlights
Researchers have used the classical collaborative memory paradigm to explore the effects of collaboration2
If our results showed that collaborative inhibition occurred in the overlapping condition but not in the non-overlapping condition, this would indicate that the theory of the retrieval-disruption hypothesis, which was raised by Basden et al.3, is reliable, or we can say that the retrieval-disruption hypothesis is stable by manipulating the item similarity variable
A 2 × 2 mixed-factor analysis of variance (ANOVA) on recall showed that the main effect of item similarity was statistically significant, which showed that overlapping items were better recalled than non-overlapping items, F [1, 26] = 77.39, p < 0.001, partial η2 = 0.75
Summary
Researchers have used the classical collaborative memory paradigm to explore the effects of collaboration. Weldon and Bellinger first demonstrated that, in the retrieval phase, individuals who work together as a collaborative group perform much more poorly than the same number of people who recall individually A marginally significant interaction between item similarity and retrieval condition was observed in both studies Both studies concluded that non-overlapping information was less susceptible to collaborative inhibition than overlapping information, which supports the retrieval disruption hypothesis. This indicates that items recalled by others may be more or less disruptive to another’s memory depending on how similar they are to the other person’s recalled items. In another study involving adults, researchers used entirely non-overlapping items (but no overlapping condition) as studied materials, in accordance with their research aims, and observed persistent but attenuated impairment of collaborative participants’ recall performance
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