The detrimental and beneficial effects of collaboration are sensitive to both collaborative frequency and collaborative order but not to the encoding task

Abstract

Extensive attention has been dedicated to studying the influence of others on genuine or false memory during ongoing and post-collaboration. These studies have revealed both detrimental and beneficial effects on episodic memory. Although ongoing effects such as collaborative inhibition have been examined in the semantic situation, the post-collaboration effects have not received the same level of scrutiny To address this gap, the current study instructed participants to either generate or remember idioms during the study phase, which encompassed semantic and episodic encoding. There were three recall sessions, during which four groups were designated: individual (III), preceding collaboration (CII), following collaboration (ICI), and multiple collaboration (CCI). The main results and implications of the study are outlined below. (a) The detrimental effect of collaborative inhibition was found to be sensitive to collaborative frequency, indicating that the contribution of retrieval strategy disruption proposed by the Retrieval Strategy Disruption Hypothesis (RSDH) is conditional. (b) We observed a reliable beneficial effect of error pruning, as evidenced by smaller errors in collaborators compared to individual participants. Furthermore, this beneficial effect was consistently evident in both ongoing and post-collaboration scenarios for the two encoding tasks. (c) The post-collaborative memory benefit was observed in both Recall 2 and Recall 3. This suggests that mechanisms such as relearning, cross-cueing, re-exposure, and pruning errors may have contributed to this effect. (d) The observation of the beneficial effects of picked-up and shared memory indicates the contribution of similar mechanisms as to post-collaborative memory benefit. (e) These effects were observed regardless of the encoding task, but they were influenced by both collaborative frequency and collaborative order. The results are discussed in terms of the RSDH and other relevant theories. Additionally, future research directions are provided.

Keywords:

• Collaboration
• collaborative inhibition
• collaborative memory
• episodic memory
• error pruning
• post-collaborative memory benefit
• semantic encoding

Authors contribution

Both authors designed the experiment and wrote the manuscript, and the second author collected and analyzed the data.

Ethics statement

The Research Ethics Committee of Zhejiang University approved all protocols, and all procedures followed the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional and national) and following the Helsinki Declaration.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest. All authors have seen and approved the manuscript being submitted. We warrant that the manuscript is our original work, and it has not received prior publication and is not under consideration for publication elsewhere.

Data availability statement

The datasets generated and/or analyzed and the materials of the current study can be available from the corresponding author at request.

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by the Natural Science Foundation of Shanxi Province of China (Grant No. 202303021221150), the Research Project Supported by Shanxi Scholarship Council of China (Grant No. 2024-090), the Humanities and Social Sciences, Ministry of Education of China (Grant No. 21YJA190005), Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. LY21C090002), Initial Scientific Research Fund of Shanxi Normal University, National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 31300831).