Application and Analysis of Cognitive Search Models on Collaborative Memory Tasks

ISBN-10
ISBN-13
9798379723354
Category
Cognitive psychology
Language
English
Published
2023
Author
Willa M. Mannering

Description

While humans often encode and retrieve memories in groups, the bulk of our knowledge of human memory comes from paradigms with individuals in isolation. The primary phenomenon of interest within the field of collaborative memory is collaborative inhibition: the tendency for collaborative groups to underperform in free recall tasks compared to nominal groups of the same size. Most research in this field is led by verbal conceptual theories without guidance from formal computational models. The goal of this dissertation was to expand the modeling efforts for collaborative memory within both episodic and semantic memory tasks by developing a formal computational model of collaborative recall. To this aim, a collaborative framework to scale the Search of Associative Memory model (SAM; Raaijmakers & Shiffrin, 1981) to collaborative free recall paradigms (dubbed cSAM) with multiple models working together was presented. This work shows that SAM, adapted to cSAM, can act as a unified theory to explain both individual and collaborative memory effects and can also provide insight into mechanistic explanations of collaborative inhibition that would be difficult or nearly impossible to study behaviorally. Additionally, collaborative inhibition in semantic memory tasks has received concerningly little attention from the field and existing studies (of which there are only 2) have employed a task more similar to fact retrieval paradigms (Andersson & Ronnberg, 1996; Weldon, 2000). To remedy this gap in knowledge, a novel collaborative verbal fluency task was employed to determine whether collaborative inhibition is present in semantic memory tasks in which category structure is prominent. Furthermore, individual and group search behaviors were analyzed using an optimal foraging model of semantic memory. Collaborative inhibition was present in the collaborative verbal fluency task and cognitive search behavior differed significantly between collaborative and nominal groups. Altogether, this work significantly contributes to the modeling and experimental efforts within the collaborative memory field which will help the field generate new predictions and experiments to advance the study of memory storage and retrieval.

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