Collaborative inhibition persists following social processing

Abstract

In this experiment, participants read target words that were presented in the context of a social sentence “Willow towered over Meadow” or a nonsocial sentence “The willow towered over the meadow.” Subsequently, they received a surprise cued recall test for the target nouns/names and completed the test either alone or in a group of two. Despite the fact that the stimulus materials were held constant across conditions, participants showed a social processing advantage in memory—that is, they remembered the social (name) versions of the target words significantly better than the nonsocial (noun) versions. Further, the social benefit was not strong enough to neutralise the inhibitory effects of collaboration as collaborative groups (two people working together) recalled significantly fewer words than did nominal groups (combined, nonredundant, output of two individuals working separately). The present study also demonstrated robust collaborative inhibition with cued recall, a task previously assumed to eliminate such inhibition.

Keywords:

• Collaborative memory
• Cued recall
• Social memory

Notes

¹With regard to the original motivation for these studies, one is left to wonder why social expertise did not eliminate collaborative inhibition as aviation expertise had in Meade et al. (2009). Is there something different about these types of expertise (e.g., aviation expertise is more constrained with fewer situations and limited relevant information)? Was “social expertise” manipulated or measured appropriately? Or, is it the case that people are not actually experts at remembering social information? There are a myriad of possibilities that researchers could examine, but the present paper was not designed to address them.

²Originally, the number of targets factor was designed as a simple manipulation of the degree of “socialness” in the sentence, with two targets potentially representing a more social sentence. In retrospect, however, we failed to account for the added difficulties of having two key pieces of information absent during recall of a short sentence. Hence, we cannot draw any firm conclusions when comparing across degree of “socialness” (i.e., comparing one-target vs. two-target sentences). However, the sentence type (social vs. nonsocial) comparison within the two-target condition is still relevant and will be discussed.