Collaborative Problem-Solving Interactions in Young and Old Married Couples

Abstract

The study explores the importance of conversational processes for understanding collaborative cognitive performance by examining the interactions of married couples that facilitate performance on 2 everyday cognitive tasks. Twenty-four adults, 6 young (M age = 29.7 years) and 6 older (M = 70.8 years) married couples, completed a vacation decision-making task and an errand-running task. Couples were asked to talk as they performed the tasks and speech acts were coded as to whether they involved high-affiliation exchanges (between-partner sequences of cooperative and obliging speech acts) or low-affiliation exchanges (between-partner sequences of controlling and withdrawing speech acts). Interactions characterized by high affiliation were associated with greater use of information and the use of feature based DISCOURSE PROCESSES, 35(1), search strategies on the decision-making task and shorter routes on the errand-running task. Open-ended interviews revealed the importance of division of labor and delegation when collaborating in daily life. The results illustrate the diversity present in couples' interactive patterns and approaches to collaboration. Further, the results demonstrate the potential of integrating work on collaborative cognition and conversational processes.Researchers investigating cognition in everyday contexts have examined how individuals make decisions (e.g.. Given the focus of this literature on the cognitive outcomes of collaboration, little research has examined the social interactions that may facilitate collaborative performance. This study examines how married couples solve everyday problems together and the interactions that facilitate everyday problem-solving performance. Gould et al., 1991) found that married couples benefit from working together to perform memory tasks. Their work also suggests features of interactions that are important for facilitating performance. Dixon (1992) found that young and old adults who worked with one or two other people outperformed individuals who completed free recall and fact memory tasks alone. Young and old adults benefited from group discussions regarding strategies that would maximize performance, negotiations regarding how the strategies would be implemented and the correct answer to the problems. Through an examination of the conversations involved in remembering, Gould et al. (1994) found that older married couples were more likely than younger married couples to time their discussion concerning strategies for remembering at a point when individual-based recall was declining. Thus, it appears that married couples benefit when collaboration occurs through interactions that involve shared effort, negotiations, and elaborations that support and extend individual cognitive functioning. An extensive literature in child development provides further support for the idea that qualities of individuals' interactions are important for understanding cognitive performance in collaborative settings (see Rogoff, 1998, for a review). A potentially interactive co...

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