Can Group Work Harm Your Memory ?

A new study by psychologists from the University of Liverpool and the University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT) reveals that group work can harm your memory. The same study also found out that group work boosts later individual learning.

The research provides the first systematic investigation into benefits and cost of collaborative remembering. In the study conducted by Dr. Craig Thorley, the University's Department of Psychological Sciences, and Dr. Stéphanie Marion, from UOIT's Faculty of Social Science and Humanities, 64 earlier collaborative studies were analyzed.

The main cause that limits group memory is collaborative inhibition. As a student we have used a number of tricks to boost our ability to remember, and for every one of us using group, studies was a method for last minute revisions. Even in our professional life we use groups to find solutions.

But as it turns out the overall recall of a group is lesser than that of the individuals. For example, if a group consists of 5 people, their combined recall was compared to the recall of 5 individuals, but their individual recalls were combined. Collaborative group recall was consistently lower than pooled individual recall. This effect is known as collaborative inhibition.

According to Dr. Craig Thorley, "Every individual develops their own preferred retrieval strategies for recalling information. For example, Person A may prefer to recall information in the order it was learned but Person B may prefer to recall it in the reverse order. Importantly, recall is greatest when people can use their own preferred retrieval strategies."

When a group tries to recall, each individual uses their own retrieval strategies and in the process disrupt the retrieval strategies of other group members. This leads to the entire group underperforming. As opposed to these individuals who work alone used their own retrieval paths and can easily perform better than groups.

Some striking discoveries from the studies reveal that family members perform better in collaboration than strangers. Also, smaller groups perform better than larger groups. This is because in a smaller group there are fewer disruptive retrieval strategies.

One outcome worth noting is the effect on later memory. Collaborating in the group boosts later individual recall.

Dr. Stéphanie Marion, states: "We believe that this occurs as working in a group means people are re-exposed to things they may have forgotten and this boosts their memory later on. One of the important consequences of this is that it suggests getting people to work together to remember something (e.g., students revising together) is beneficial for individual learning."