A context-based model of collaborative inhibition during memory search

Abstract

Abstract Contrary to common intuition, a group of people recalling information together remembers less than the same number of individuals recalling alone (i.e., the collaborative inhibition effect). To understand this effect in a free recall task, we build a computational model of collaborative recall in groups, extended from the Context Maintenance and Retrieval (CMR) model, which captures how individuals recall information alone. We propose that in collaborative recall, one not only uses their previous recall as an internal retrieval cue, but one also listens to someone else’s recall and uses it as an external retrieval cue. Attending to this cue updates the listener’s context to be more similar to the context of someone else’s recall. Over an existing dataset of individual and collaborative recall in small and large groups, we show that our model successfully captures the difference in memory performance between individual recall and collaborative recall across different group sizes from 2 to 16, as well as additional recall patterns such as recency effects and semantic clustering effects. Our model further shows that collaborating individuals reach similar areas in the context space, whereby their contexts converge more than the contexts of individuals recalling alone. This convergence constrains their ability to search memories effectively and is negatively associated with recall performance. We discuss the contributions of our modeling results in relation to previous accounts of the collaborative inhibition effect.

Keywords

• Collaborative inhibition
• Group recall
• Memory search
• Computational modeling