A comparison of group and individual remembering: Does collaboration disrupt retrieval strategies?

Abstract

M. S. Weldon and K. D. Bellinger (1997) showed that people who collaborate on a recall test (collaborative group) perform much more poorly than the same number of people tested individually (nominal group). Four experiments tested the hypothesis that retrieval-strategy disruption underlies this collaborative inhibition when categorized lists are studied. Collaborative groups performed worse than nominal groups when categories were large (Experiment 1) and when category names were provided at recall (Experiment 2). However, collaborative- and nominal-group recall were equivalent when participants retrieved nonoverlapping parts of the list (Experiment 3) and when participants were forced to organize their recall by category (Experiment 4). Clearly, disorganized retrieval can account for collaborative inhibition with the materials and procedures used here.

The more you remember the more you decide: Collaborative memory in adolescents with intellectual disability and their assistants

“…Ross, Spencer, Linardator, Lam & Perunovic, 2004). The effect has also been observed for a variety of materials like pictures (Finlay et al, 2000;Weldon & Bellinger, 1997), a movie clip (Ekeocha & Brennan, 2008), stories (Andersson & Collaborative Memory with Assistants 5 Rönnberg, 1995;Takahashi & Saito, 2004;Weldon & Bellinger, 1997), and related words (Basden, Basden, Bryner, & Thomas III, 1997).…”

“…The idea is that every person has an optimal order in which to recall, in relation to the strategy used, and that order is individual. In collaboration, collaborators have different optimal recall order and at least one person is forced to change order (Basden et al, 1997).…”

Memory, metamemory, and social cues: Between conformity and resistance.

“…First, the social perspective underscores the fact that remembering often does not unfold in social isolation, but rather in the presence and with active participation of other people (Blank, 2009;Hirst & Echterhoff, 2012;Hirst & Rajaram, 2014; Rajaram & PereiraPasarin, 2010). A number of important studies have shown how collaborating with other people affects remembering, often in negative ways, reducing output from memory (Basden, Basden, Bryner, & Thomas, 1997) or introducing errors (Gabbert, Memon, & Allan, 2003;Meade & Roediger, 2002). Second, the metamemory perspective underscores the fact that the process of remembering does not stop when memory is retrieved but continues in the form of metamemory decisions which determine how information retrieved from memory will be used to build a memory report -that is, the overt answer provided to a memory question (Koriat & Goldsmith, 1996).…”

“…Two prominent strands of research in the area of social memory deserve a mention here. First, research concerning collaborative inhibition focuses on how remembering in groups of individuals may limit the quantity of remembered information compared to the output of nominal groups created from the same number of individuals remembering in isolation (Barber, Harris, & Rajaram, 2015;Basden et al, 1997;Congleton & Rajaram, 2014).…”

“…Two prominent strands of research in the area of social memory deserve a mention here. First, research concerning collaborative inhibition focuses on how remembering in groups of individuals may limit the quantity of remembered information compared to the output of nominal groups created from the same number of individuals remembering in isolation (Barber, Harris, & Rajaram, 2015;Basden et al, 1997;Congleton & Rajaram, 2014).Second, research concerning memory conformity, the topic of the present study, focuses on how information provided by other people affects the contents of a memory report (Gabbert, Memon, & Wright, 2006;Wright, Mathews, & Skagerberg, 2005;Wright, Self, & Justice, 2000). This line of research is therefore concerned with how information provided by one individual migrates to a memory report of another individual.…”