A COMPARISON OF GROUP AND INDIVIDUAL REMEMBERING - DOES COLLABORATIONDISRUPT RETRIEVAL STRATEGIES

M. S. Weldon and K. D. Bellinger (1997) showed that people who collabo rate on a recall test (collaborative group) perform much more poorly t han the same number of people tested individually (nominal group). Fou r experiments tested the hypothesis that retrieval-strategy disruption underlies this collaborative inhibition when categorized lists are st udied. Collaborative groups performed worse than nominal groups when c ategories were large (Experiment 1) and when category names were provi ded at recall (Experiment 2). However, collaborative and nominal-group recall were equivalent when participants retrieved nonoverlapping par ts of the list (Experiment 3) and when participants were forced to org anize their recall by category (Experiment 4). Clearly, disorganized r etrieval can account for collaborative inhibition with the materials a nd procedures used here.