Institut für Kognitionswissenschaft

Institute of Cognitive Science


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26. March 2018 : Two perform better than the best individual without any information exchange & performance similarities predict the group benefit.

New publ.:
Wahn B, Czeszumski A, König P (2018). Performance similarities predict collective benefits in dyadic and triadic joint visual search. PLoS ONE 13(1): e0191179.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0191179

When humans perform tasks together, they may reach a higher performance in comparison to the best member of a group (i.e., a collective benefit).

In this study, we investigated collective benefits for joint visuospatial tasks. We tested whether dyads and triads reach a collective benefit when they are forbidden to exchange any information while performing the task and whether interindividual performance similarities predict collective benefits.

We found that dyads reached a collective benefit. Triads did outperform their best individual member and dyads – yet, they did not outperform the best dyad pairing within the triad. In addition, similarities in performance significantly predicted the collective benefit for dyads and triads.