Beneficial And Detrimental Effects Of Collaborative Frequency And Collaborative Order On Memory Performance

Collaborative memory is operationally defined as the memory for events that are usually studied individually but are subsequently retrieved in the form of group that consists of at least two members.A large number of past studies has confirmed that collaboration can elicit detrimental(e.g.collaborative inhibition)or beneficial effect(e.g.error pruning)on memory performance.Previous studies in multi-phase collaborative memory have found that collaborative frequency and collaborative order have a certain moderating effect on the memory performance of final individual recall task.However,on the one hand,previous research only focused on the collaborative inhibition and error pruning that occurred in the first recall stage,and ignored the influence of these effects on subsequent recall tasks of multi-phase collaborative recall;on the other hand,the predecessors mainly adopted episodic memory task that use vocabulary lists or stories as experimental materials to study collaborative memory,but little attention has been paid to the influence of collaboration on semantic memory,and some controversy remains.Therefore,this study controlled collaborative frequency and collaborative order,adopted free-flowing recall,and set episodic memory task and semantic generation task simultaneously to explore the influence of collaboration on memory performance under the conditions of two kinds of memory task.This study includes two experiments,and adopted three-phase collaborative recall paradigm(Recall 1,Recall 2 and Recall 3).Experiment 1 controlled the frequency of collaboration by setting up the nominal group(III),the single collaborative group(CII)and the multiple collaborative group(CCI);Experiment 2 set up the nominal group(III),the preceding collaborative group(CII)and the following collaborative group(ICI)to control the collaborative order,in which "I" represented individual recall task,and "C" represented collaborative recall task.Both experiments conducted episodic memory task and semantic generation task.The episodic memory task used four-character Chinese idioms as materials for idiom memory,and the semantic generation task used pictures that can generate corresponding idioms as materials for idiom generation.In the learning phase,the participants of the idiom memory task were asked to memorize the four-character Chinese idioms presented on screen,and the participants of the idiom generation task were required to generate the corresponding four-character Chinese idioms based on presented pictures and memorize them;in the recall phase,all participants need to retrieve these Chinese idioms learned before and write them down on the answer sheet individually or collaboratively.The results of Experiment 1showed that significant collaborative inhibition and error pruning were recorded in Recall 1;them were not again recorded in Recall 2,but a continuation of the two effects were recorded;in Recall 3,the number of correctly recalled idioms manifested as CCI > CII >III,which means that the performance of final individual recall was sensitive to collaborative frequency;shared memory effect was recorded in Recall 3,and it was also sensitive to collaborative frequency.Based on the results of Experiment 2,Recall 1 also recorded significant collaborative inhibition and error pruning;both the two effects and their continuation were recorded in Recall 2;memory performance of final individual recall was sensitive to collaborative order,with the number of correctly recalled idioms showed in a manner of ICI > CII > III;both shared memory effect and picked-up effect were recorded in Recall 3,and share memory was also sensitive to collaborative order.The results of both experiments in all three recall phases showed significantly better performance for semantic generation task than episodic memory task,but in terms of false recall,the former was consistently higher than the latter in Experiment 1,whereas this difference was only presented in Recall 1 of Experiment 2.The main conclusions of the current study are as follows.(1)Memory performance of final individual recall is sensitive to collaborative frequency.The role of cross-cueing,re-exposure,and relearning mechanisms in collaboration is supported.(2)Memory performance of final individual recall is sensitive to collaborative order,which provided some empirical evidence for the retrieval strategy disruption hypothesis.(3)Collaboration inhibition and error pruning in Recall 1 affect subsequent recall phase,but whether these two effects could be recorded again in subsequent recall phase is moderated by collaborated or not in Recall 1.(4)Semantic memory is affected by collaboration as episodic memory and in the same pattern,but the semantic generation task has better memory performance and shows greater stability than the episodic memory task.(5)collaboration can elicit pick-up effects and shared memory,and shared memory is sensitive to collaborative frequency and collaborative order.