Title: Cognition and Social Dynamics: a New Approach to Emergent Phenomena

Chair: Alin Coman (University of Pittsburgh) Presenters: Winter Mason (Yahoo Research) David Reitter (Carnegie Mellon University) Alin Coman (University of Pittsburgh) Discussant: Bill Hirst (New School for )

Brief summary Students of cognition are beginning to investigate how social processes underlying collective performance interact with well-studied individual information-processing mechanisms. We illustrate this new approach by examining the formation of collective memory, the of group intelligence, and the relation between communication and collective problem solving.

Extended summary During the past 60 years, psychology has produced an impressive line of research aimed at clarifying the functioning of the human cognitive system. The research generally focused on understanding cognitive mechanisms at an individual level. In a parallel effort, analysis investigates large-scale phenomena by focusing on social structures and dynamics. Recently, these two efforts have joined forces to explore how social processes underlying collective performance interact with well-studied individual information-processing mechanisms. The talks in this panel will present empirical research that examines the complex interdependencies between cognition and social dynamics.

Alin Coman (and collaborators) explores the processes involved in the emergence of collective memories. They focus on a highly documented individual cognitive mechanism: retrieval induced forgetting (RIF). Previous research extended the RIF phenomenon to social settings, establishing that the mere act of listening to another remember can also induce forgetting. Coman explores how socially-shared retrieval- induced forgetting can propagate through a sequence of social interaction, providing a basis for understanding how a social network might form a collective memory. An agent-based model of this process is discussed.

David Reitter (and collaborators) investigates how individual cognitive functions and their limitations affect communication and, in doing so, give rise to an emerging group intelligence. He introduces Geo Game, a computer mediated experimental task and technical platform. Geo Game was created in order to conduct controlled experiments with networks of humans, where information spreads by word of mouth. Reitter contrasts a situation where information flows freely and is omnipresent with one where network nodes filter information according to their relevance. The talk discusses the effect of communication policies on the efficiency and the performance of teams and of individuals at different network positions. Information propagation is further explored using an ACT-R cognitive modeling framework.

Winter Mason (and collaborators) examines how network structure affects collective problem solving. He is building on the fact that many complex problems in science, business, and engineering require a trade-off between exploitation of known solutions and exploration of new possibilities. When complex problems are solved by collectives rather than individuals, this explore–exploit tradeoff is complicated by the presence of communication networks, which can accelerate collective learning, but can also lead to convergence on suboptimal solutions. Mason will discuss a series of 195 web-based experiments in which groups of 16 individuals collectively solved a complex problem and shared information through different communication networks. He and his collaborators found that network structure affected collective performance indirectly, via its impact on individual search strategies, as well as directly, by impacting the speed of information diffusion. They also found that networks in general suppress individual exploration, but greatly amplify the benefits of the exploration that takes place. Finally, they identified two ways in which individual and collective performances were in tension, consistent with longstanding theoretical claims.

Hirst will serve as discussant.